“I believe I can be better than the machine.” The street runs deeply in his blood. Urbanski left his days of full-time train bombing back in Berlin where he started writing in his teens and now creates large, shimmering, optically bending spaces composed from the architectural squares, triangles and hexagons of today’s contemporary built environment. The years as an undergraduate student in the very newly de-walled Berlin was a time of devotion to graffiti for this Polish-born but German-homed artist. It was only after he had received his BA in Communication and Graphic Design (BTK-FH, Berlin) (2010) and set off to complete an MFA at the University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland (2012), that Urbanski left the train yards behind to pursue a more traditional form of painting full-time. The works you see before you today are a culmination of that biography, a testament to abstract art as a direct engagement with the world, not a withdrawal from it. Since his 2012 Residency in South Africa Urbanski has devoted his time to the streets, cultures and social interactions of his new home city, Cape Town.
Selected Projects & Exhibitions: 2016 – FNB Joburg Art Fair with Salon91; Paths, two-man exhibition with Tahiti Pehrson, at Salon91; Paper is You III, group show at Salon91; Winter Collection, group show with Everard Read, Cape Town. 2015 – Bronze, Steel and Stone, group sculpture show at Circa & Everard Read, Johannesburg; This is the Place, a group exhibition at Salon91; Turbine Art Fair with Salon91; MINDGAME, a solo show at Salon91; Cape Town Art Fair with Salon91. 2014 – Cape Town Art Fair with Salon91; Turbine Art Fair with Salon91; Paper is You II, group show at Salon91. 2013 – Cape Town Art Fair with Salon91; A Vacant Passage, Salon91; Kalahari Catalyst Art Auction, Cape Town; One K Collection, Lovell Gallery, Cape Town; Abstract Stories, /A Word of Art, Cape Town. 2012 – Chance Visitor, /A Word of Art, Cape Town; Neo-Maso, Geneva, Switzerland; Art Base, Art Festival, Berlin; Retranchment-Manoir de Martigny, Switzerland; Living Walls, The City Speaks, Atlanta, Georgia, USA; The Swarm exhibition, Vancouver, Canada. 2011 – Process No. 14, Prozessgallerie, Berlin.
