Adam Kozicki. War of Everyone Against Everyone

A painting show by Adam Kozicki about the internet and the people who live in it. The starting point is 24-hour livestreams and internet reality shows such as Fishtank LIVE; the result is portraits and cramped interiors painted in oil and acrylic ink applied with an airbrush. This is painting about how the network seeps into daily life and identity.

Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej on the exhibition:

In his latest exhibition, Adam Kozicki explores the pulsating, nervous rhythm of the contemporary internet - a space where cultural wars constantly smolder, and fragmented information streams create emotional tensions, blurring the lines between fact, opinion, and emotion. The artist views the network as a space where disputes over values and identity collide, but also our desires related to what is socially permissible and accepted.

The exhibition takes as its starting point internet reality shows and 24-hour broadcasts, such as Fishtank LIVE, in which participants, aiming to attract viewers, deliberately transgress accepted linguistic and social norms. Their format is based on confining a group of people in a space observed by cameras 24 hours a day. Participants are often individuals with diverse political views, whose involvement in the program is primarily motivated by economic considerations. Viewers not only follow the events but also directly influence the program’s course through paid messages, tasks, and other forms of interaction. The broadcast simultaneously becomes a reality show, a performance, a social experiment, and a laboratory of power relations. However, Kozicki does not treat these phenomena as exotic curiosities. Nor does he judge them from a position of moral superiority. Rather, he shows a world where the boundaries between reality and spectacle are increasingly blurred. In digital communities, he perceives microworlds offering participants a sense of belonging and acceptance, and a chance to improve their material situation.

His painted portraits and claustrophobic interiors resemble stage designs lacking a stable narrative, and the characters inhabiting them remain ambiguous - they are amalgams of identities that constantly mutate, interpenetrate, and disintegrate under the influence of successive projections. The titles of his paintings may evoke the figure of an anti-hero, a loner who transgresses accepted norms. However, the artist sees his figures differently: as individuals in whom a certain kind of surplus accumulates - of emotions, stimuli, and tension, but also of pleasure. In the evocative portraits, faces appear simultaneously familiar and alien, as if belonging to many people at once, like avatars circulating between platforms and scenes. These paintings thus become a kind of emotional and social portrait, in which the artist recognizes his own experiences and those of people close to him.

The artist paints with oil paint and acrylic ink applied to canvas using an airbrush. In this way, he creates dense textures on the painting’s surface, causing the portrayed figure to merge with the background of its surrounding domestic space. Although the reference point for these works is a world dominated by digitally generated and distributed images, Kozicki does not use artificial intelligence as a tool for building painterly composition. All depictions arise from an imagination fueled by the memory of images, experiences, and emotions, only to then materialize in one of the most traditional art mediums.

What to expect

What you will mostly see are paintings: evocative portraits and claustrophobic interiors that resemble stage sets without a stable narrative. The figures in them stay ambiguous - Kozicki describes them as amalgams of identities that mutate, interpenetrate and fall apart under the pressure of successive projections. Faces look familiar and alien at the same time, as if they belonged to several people at once, like avatars circulating between platforms and scenes. The artist treats these works as a kind of emotional and social portrait, one in which he recognises his own experiences and those of people close to him.

The context is internet reality shows and round-the-clock broadcasts, Fishtank LIVE among them, where a group of people is confined to a space watched by cameras 24 hours a day and viewers steer the programme through paid messages and tasks. Kozicki does not judge any of this from a position of moral superiority, nor does he treat it as an exotic curiosity - he shows a world where the line between reality and spectacle keeps blurring, and he sees in digital communities microworlds that offer belonging and a chance to improve one’s material situation.

It is worth looking closely at the surface of the canvases: oil paint and airbrushed acrylic ink build dense textures through which the figure merges with the domestic space around it. On view from 12 September 2026 to 10 January 2027.

Tickets, opening hours, and current details are on the Museum of Modern Art website.

Museum profile: Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej.