Piotr Hanzelewicz (Poland, 1978) lives in Italy.

He has pursued various studies and worked in many fields. Hanzelewicz works on the boundary between transparency and opacity, both aesthetically and semantically. The raw materials he uses are idiomatic expressions, habits, and conventions. His artistic investigation focuses on planes of ambiguity: wherever another meaning is hidden, a “double bottom,” a secret passage, or a vox media, there is fertile ground to push ambiguity to its extremes, either toward paroxysm or toward a conscious redefinition of the ambiguous object’s meaning. If the word is central, it is always a real word, acting in shaping the vision of reality or its interpretation. When reality is “named,” it is molded into a concrete form. Between transparency and opacity moves a process of disambiguation that seeks to clarify what is complicated while preserving the fascination of complexity. In short, the aim is to untangle the thread without losing it. While the raw materials reside in language and its cultural sedimentations, the materials are most often ephemeral and delicate: tracing paper, acetates, and intaglio papers to translate opacity, transparency, and seriality (where serial production is always rigorously made by hand as a series of unique pieces).

Hanzelewicz works with concepts, relating them to spaces and their history, connecting them to his own experience. As a direct consequence, he often creates site-specific and context-specific works.

Since 2011, he “inhabits” his solo exhibitions, welcoming visitors in the role of host. His work is that of a conceptual artist who is not cold, but poetic and political.