Michał Nowak is an emerging artist based in Krakow, Poland. His work critiques modern technocratic culture by portraying forgotten urban spaces using the formal aesthetic of Polish realist painting. His gritty portraits of the infrastructure of modern civilization enable us to reconsider our mediated relationship to material progress and innovation.

The artist's Peron (Platform) Series was painted on the basis of one second-long video clips filmed from a moving subway car. Creating a painting from such raw, unedited, footage allows the artist to distance himself from conventional methods of recording reality. Modern communication technology has replaced the experience of creating personal memories with a process of framing and storing information. Poorly realized shots and accidental compositions offer an ideal way to restore our awareness of the qualities of real-life experience that cannot be captured and packaged as mere megabytes of information.

Nowak's most recent work has featured abandoned industrial sites, the "ruins" of contemporary civilization. The landscape of Silesia is dotted with the remains of former mines and factories. Today, these objects serve no useful purpose to society and lack a defined function. They have thus become in the artist's words, "monuments to deconstruction." In his work, Nowak attempts to rediscover these spaces. He believes that these factories, which lack shiny new facades and efficient, modern, designs, can speak to us about the rarely questioned "triumph" of science and progress that humanity has been striving for since the dawn of the enlightenment. Confronting these leftover sites forces us to consider the meaning behind of the unnaturally fast rate of change that characterizes contemporary life. Viewers are led to consider how they themselves enable these changes to take place and are not merely the pawns of a larger globalized commercial order.