Garvey|Simon is pleased to present Kacper Kowalski: Above, on view through June 24, 2023. The exhibition features a selection of abstract aerial landscape photographs from Kowalski’s bird’s eye lens. All of the artist’s photographs are taken by hand from a self-piloted gyrocopter and observe his native Poland from a lofty perspective. Kacper Kowalski: Above follows his solo exhibition at San Francisco International Airport. For inquires, please contact [email protected] or [email protected].

Kacper Kowalski began his career as a landscape photographer, far before the preeminence of drones or Google Earth, strapping himself into a gyrocopter and exploring his native Poland through the lens of a film camera. This repeated, almost ritualistic exploration of home became the foundation of his work. Kowalski observes the macro-evolution of the Polish landscape as it is progressively shaped and morphed by its inhabitants. Seasons shift rapidly in riots of color and pattern, humans leave intricate tracks in barren slates of snowfall, and in his series, “Toxic Beauty,” large-scale industry spills supernatural plumes of ash and smoke into the atmosphere, producing a painterly tableau of texture and light. Witnessed from 500 feet above, these instances of time and change are flattened and compressed into two-dimensional cross-sections like a microscope’s slide. At once massive and miniature, Kowalski teases out the universality in the patterns of change, showing the intrinsic link between people and land. Kowalski’s most recent series, “Event Horizon,” includes aerial images of bodies of water in Northern Poland, near his Tricity home. At once violent and tranquil, ghostly orbs of thawed ice float in an endless abyss, and craggy masses of ice sheets gnash at the water. Taken from a much higher altitude, these photographs are not only landscapes, but visual containers for the experience of flight.