Waldemar Kolbusz

Waldemar Kolbusz lives and works in Perth and has been painting full-time and exhibiting regularly for over two decades both nationally and internationally.

Kolbusz paints in two streams which interrelate. His figurative works test the differences between an idealised human experience and actual experience – the increasingly blurred overlap between the two in our contemporary lives. His expressionistic works explore this same fine edge: they allude to a kind of perfection, but then to something else.

“His paintings are palpable intermissions simmering with a jostling, charged fragility. Often large-scale and saturated, while their subjects are of foreign places abroad, their essence is about interior states: something amorphous, something incomprehensible.

These are not just paintings that make us feel or reflect on serious or frivolous emotions; but works that enact a scepticism regarding the very experience of serious and frivolous emotions in themselves. Feelings are immeasurable. Does painting produce, capture, reflect or nullify them? In Kolbusz’s hands, the content leaks between limbo and surety.” (Excerpt from Diversions by Aimee Dodds, June 2023)