ROBERT SZCZERBOWSKI

Robert Szczerbowski was born in Poznań in 1959. He is a Polish interdisciplinary artist whose diverse and highly individual practice resists easy categorization. He studied philosophy in the 1980s and began his artistic creativity around the same time in literature. In early work, he explored the boundaries of language and narrative, employing experimental forms of writing. He is the author of books including The Book of Life (1990), Æ (1991), and Compositions (1991). In 1995, he pioneered the publication of Polish literary texts in digital form (hypertext Æ, 2nd ed.). His works are found in museums and private collections.

Since the mid-1990s, Szczerbowski has devoted himself exclusively to visual art. Working in various media (paintings, objects, installations, video), he addresses issues related to the cultural consequences of digital transformation. He focuses on human identity and consciousness in the context of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the emerging social media. 
In his ouvre, he builds coherent, autonomous narrative worlds that transcend the conventional definitions of individual media. He utilizes the aesthetics and language of advanced technologies. In paintings, the artist references the structures of fractal geometry and biometric facial recognition systems. In objects and installations, he employs programming languages, transforming their specialized codes into carriers of cultural and symbolic meaning.

In 1997, Robert Szczerbowski received a grant from the Polish Culture Foundation to implement a new project that entered the field of visual art. Two exhibitions: Retrospective at the end of Time (1997) was a catalog of a non-existent exhibition. This bilingual publication contained only illustrations—photographs of objects and their descriptions.
Based on this catalogue, a real exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw under the same title was reconstructed in 1998. The subtitle, "A Retrospective at the End of Time," concealed the mystification that most of these works had never been publicly displayed before. The project seemed to be a recapitulation, or rather, a historical retrospective, of human spiritual culture to date in the context of the new era of information, technology, and science. Although deeply rooted in references to the external world of culture, it ultimately referred to the inner sphere of human experience—the domain of mind, memory, and spirituality.

After 2000, Robert Szczerbowski turned to painting, also creating video works.

In the series titled Fractal paintings (2000-2003), the artist used traditional means to depict dense and colorful geometric structures on canvases, composed of pixels painted in oil or acrylic. Discovering the potential of fractal geometry for art, Szczerbowski draws these virtual structures into the real world and materializes them as painterly subjects. He is inspired by the similarity of forms created as a result of purely mathematical operations and using a machine (but not AI) to astonishing motifs, often psychedelic, known from the sphere of human imagination, which have previously manifested themselves in art and religion, among other places.
In turn, in a series of portraits titled ID (Identity) from 2020, rendered in grayscale, he evokes ubiquitous facial recognition technology. He develops the motif of the pixelated image, which first appeared in his Self-Portrait from 2002. In this series, Szczerbowski broadly addresses the topic of identity across media, evoking its various variants.
His video productions, created between 2004 and 2006, were based on digital processing and found footage. They constitute a critical response to contemporary visual perception, shaped by an overabundance of stimuli and information in the media that leaves no room for the imagination.

The recent exhibition from 2026, titled I AM AI, brings together three fictional exhibits, iconic objects where sacred texts meet machine code and the digital world of AI. It is the artist's vision of a world in which the line between the organic and the digital, between what is real and simulation, is blurred, and questions about transcendence and identity become disturbingly important.