Maciej Urbanek - Borderless Practice

For Maciej Urbanek, art has never been about choosing a single medium or belonging to a single place. His practice is shaped by movement - across borders, disciplines, and technologies. Born in Poland, raised between Poland and the United States, trained in London, and now dividing his time between Amsterdam and Abu Dhabi, Urbanek inhabits what he calls a “borderless studio.” 

That studio is not just geographic - it is material. Beginning with meticulous drawings and analogue darkroom work, Urbanek embraced early digital tools in the 2000s, then shifted toward experimental photography and, more recently, large-scale abstract painting. Each medium, he insists, is not an end in itself but a passage: “I want photography to escape photography, and painting to escape painting,” he says. 

This restlessness is not indecision - it is methodology. His photographic series - from destabilising images

of water to composite forests that read like drawings - interrogate how we perceive reality. Later works, such as Garbage Baroque, transformed everyday plastic into kaleidoscopic installations, collapsing sculpture, photography, and abstraction into a single field. 

The turn to painting was another escape route, another border crossed. Working with diluted pigments, Urbanek creates works that evoke cells, aerial landscapes, and cosmic horizons. The desert light of Abu Dhabi saturates his palette, just as London’s muted greys once shaped his photographs. For him, light is a borderless material - simultaneously local and universal. 

Mobility brings challenges — transporting large-scale works across continents is complex - but for Urbanek, movement itself is generative: “The changing environments force me to rethink. Each place changes the work, and the work changes how I see the place,”  he reflects.

“I want photography to escape photography, and painting to escape painting.”

- Maciej Urbanek