Wheel of Life / Tondos

8/22-10/15, 2023. Nebraska Wesleyan University. Elder Gallery. Lincoln, NE

Always moving and always turning, Andrew Falkowski’s Tondo Paintings have a restless variety of visual, tactile and material inquiry. His Wheel of Life paintings play with Modernist Abstraction, Thanka Paintings of the Eastern Steppes, and Ancient Greek Kylix Cups. Their Bas Relief diagrammatic surfaces have compositions and colors that loosely function as allegorical descriptions of the forces that direct one’s perception. Falkowski will also be exhibiting the ‘Skin Deep’ Tondo Series. At first glance, they appear to be discarded Tondos casually wrapped in various types of plastic bags, nominally held together by a janky array of adhesive tape. They are, in fact, Paintings. Acrylic Paint is painstakingly cast and pigmented to be an indexical mirror of common place material surfaces. The 'Skin Deep' series slides between punk rock disenfranchisement, trompe l’oeil fastidiousness and sculptural simulacrum. Lastly, Falkowski will present Tondos sculptures made from hand-made and assembled Plaster Chain links. Functioning as an installation, the Chain Tondos activate the space, exploring how perceptual attention is directed.