Seiner made a change. His talent as a painter, muralist, and graffiti artist lay in his evocative use of color and atmosphere, and his murals mirrored his studio practice, which created stories of everyday life that were larger than reality and almost dreamlike. Then shift. Gone are the human figures, and we’ve entered a new era that’s colourful, fuzzy, synthetic yet familiar to the increasingly technological world we live in. It is as if the Polish painter went from being a folk painter to creating the folk art of the future.
Now he will have his first museum exhibition. Seiner: Colorand, National Museum in Gdansk, Poland. It was perfectly timed and came at a moment of experimentation where his previous and current work marked a major shift. But it still plays with the ideas of storytelling and our limitations as viewers, and the vast ways painters can push the viewer up. “When he reaches the desired effect, he takes us beyond our comfort zone and on a journey,” says the museum. It’s a perfect note. This is SAINER’s journey, but we embrace it because he pushes us to think beyond the numbers. —Evan Prico
