Michał Budny: Randzone

Michał Budny (born in Leszno, Poland, in 1976) gives fleeting moments a radical physical tangibility in his abstract, often large-scale objects. PEAC Museum is now presenting its first comprehensive solo exhibition of the artist’s work. The show brings together some 40 works from the past twenty years, including objects, large-scale sculptures, and site-specific installations. The exhibition represents a continuation of the museum’s program of contemporary art, which links present approaches with the Paul Ege Art Collection’s focus on Minimal Art, Radical Painting, and Conceptual Art since the 1970s.

Budny works with a limited palette of colors and materials—black, white, and shades of gray, alongside metal, wood, textile, cardboard, and rubber. The strictly geometric, austere formal language of his works, with their absence of representational content, is reminiscent of Constructivism or Minimal Art. However, while the latter insists on an experience anchored exclusively in the here and now and imagines an universal viewer, the encounter with Budny’s works is deeply personal and subjective, drawing the past and future into the experience of the present. The works can be seen as a formal continuation of the historical holdings within the Paul Ege Art Collection, yet they simultaneously introduce a poetic, narrative dimension that runs counter to the minimalist dogma “What you see is what you see.” The exhibition RANDZONE (Edge Zone) explores exactly these border zones between the visible and the invisible, connection and separation, inside and outside.

Budny developed large-format wall reliefs in black rubber, for instance, whose convex and concave curves define an inside and an outside. The intense smell of the material and its deep black fill the room. By reducing the work to its bare fundamentals and making precise use of material, form, and dimension, Budny distills complex human experiences down to their essence. The artist himself describes the objects created in this way as “models for mental use.”

Michał Budny was born in 1976 in Leszno, Poland. He lives and works between Warsaw and Prague. Budny’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; South London Gallery, London, UK; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania; Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken, Germany; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland and Zachęta- National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland. The artist is represented in the Paul Ege Art Collection by several works.

Curated by Lea Altner & Dorotea Lorenz.

About PEAC Museum
The PEAC Museum is an exhibition venue for modern and contemporary art. The museum also houses the Paul Ege Art Collection (PEAC), one of Europe's most comprehensive collections in the field of color painting, expanded by works of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. The museum is located in Freiburg on the premises of the Alexander Bürkle company, which is run by the fourth generation of the Ege family. Opened in 2004 under the name “Kunstraum Alexander Bürkle”, the exhibition space covers around 1,000 square meters. Since 2019, the former art space has been operating under the name PEAC Museum.

Admission is free.