Jacek Tylicki is an American artist born 1951 in Sopot, Poland. Since 1982 he lives in New York.
participating in East Village art scene and being part of Club 57 in 1993 he opened The Now Gallery.
Art Works
Natural Art initiated by Tylicki in 1974 has originated from painting experiments made by
Kandinsky abstract art and corresponding to Jackson Pollock abstract expressionism.
Marcel Duchamp vision leading to Conceptual Art, and as a result to the Land Art
movement, brought Tylicki, in the first half of the seventies of the XX century, to a certain
conception of the aesthetic experience created by Nature only - The Natural Art. From that point, Tylicki's work has been a continuation of "the idea as an aesthetic experience"
represented with works such as Free Art, Chicken Art, "Give if you can, take if you have to" and other art actions and performances where art becomes part of philosophy.
Tylicki writes in his catalogue to an exhibition in Gallery 38 in 1996 - Copenhagen: "The Universe is
the greatest piece of art"
Citation from Chrysippos according to Philo
(De monarchia I, 215)
"Avoiding all control, I spread out sheets of white paper or canvas in the nature. For some time they stay in the grass, in the rushes of river, in the meadows or in the mountains. Nature registers its
presence, covering the surface of the paper with a scale of colors, forms, tracks.
This process is controlled by a number of agents; such as space and time, substance and causality. It
is governed by nature's intensity. It does not, than, depend on man's interference.
The papers or canvases, I'm collecting, are superior in form to any form created by a logical mind.
Nature is the greatest and most admirable creator, unlike logic it doesn't fail.
The artist obligation is not to shape - handicraft, but to take a researcher's position - an attitude
that aims at an understanding of the riddles of reality.
In such conception of Art there lies, as in the Universe itself, an immense richness, a countless
variety of forms."
During Tylicki's art-globe-trotting those artworks were created in Sweden, Denmark,
India, France, Poland, Spain, Sri Lanka, Nepal, USA, Polynesia and
are continuously created in places of his visits. A consciousness that such exercises can be
developed into a numerically infinite series of esthetically fulfilling paintings was a consciousness of
an achieved limit, which was not negated by the success that Tylicki's creations met in the gallery.
Mastery within this conception threatened painting by transforming the creative space into a deadly
routine at a more or less adequate standard. To overstep this limit only became possible by
changing the painting paradigm. From this reflection was born Natural Art. An art movement related
to Land art and Conceptual art.
"For a chicken the most beautiful is chicken", declares Tylicki in his commentary on the project
entitled Chicken & Art. To give this thesis - esthetic? philosophical? - a reality, he transforms the
Now Gallery, which he runs in New York, into a henhouse. In the henhouse - as in any henhouse -
there are live hens and chickens; but because it is now the henhouse-gallery (or maybe the
gallery-henhouse...), there are paintings on the walls, paintings which represent, in a style of
'human' realism, a chicken's beauty: the elegant silhouettes, well-shaped plumes, exciting breasts,
seductive dressing up in feathers. "To my mind", writes Tylicki "they ought to please the chickens".
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