Tm Gratkowski

Tm Gratkowski | Ideas Dreaming | 2023

Your practice centers around paper and discarded materials. What initially drew you to paper as your primary medium?

When I was in art school, having enough money to afford the cost of materials like oil paints or metals to sculpt always put me at a disadvantage – I never had enough of either money or materials to work with. At some point I started to look outside the basic art making paradigm of materials and searched for something more readily available. Paper could be found everywhere and I thought it interesting that I could turn what was so readily thrown out into art. In most cases you could find what you needed, for free, via magazines or posters and even paper scraps thrown on the streets.

The use of paper in my work was gradual. As I was using more and more paper in my early mixed-media work I eventually limited the use of other art materials and realized I could achieve everything I wanted and more by just using paper. Since that time of my early collage experiments I have never used anything but paper.

Many of your works transform waste into layered collages. Do you view this process as an environmental statement, a cultural critique, or both?

I refer to it as an anthropological study of paper. The purpose of which is both a cultural and a sociological critique to reuse paper and the information that has been printed on it in a different way. I am reminded of a quote by Jasper Johns: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something to it again.” I think it is only by default that using the material I work with can be considered environmental. I welcome that, but that is not the agenda behind using paper- a definite benefit- yes! In many ways, I am recycling and appropriating the medium and the message to create a new way of defining the ready-made and collage.

It’s interesting to consider, by what your question implies, that my studio practice has “zero-waste”. I save every bit of paper and do not throw it away because I may have a use for it at a much later time.

There was a series I made about 10 years ago where I emptied my paper-filled trash can onto the floor and made a series of works only using all these random pieces of paper. I was kind of recycling what I had already used to make something new . Maybe that’s the new environmental paradigm – to recycle what’s already been recycled.

Tm Gratkowski | Dangerous Lust | 2025

Having studied both fine art and architecture, how has your architectural training influenced your approach to structure and layering in collage?

This is always a sensitive topic and question for me to answer. Just to be clear, I was an artist well before my interest and involvement in architecture. My primary interest in architecture was to explore sculpture on a grand scale as an artform. My art process has always had an influence on how I envisioned what I was doing as an architect. My designs incorporated a similar process of multiple layers and had a structural system that enabled things to appear to float to become an amalgam of materials and layers. In the alternative education systems I went through, the one overlap that has helped define both art and architecture that I benefited from is the ability to envision, design, fabricate, and a practical understanding how to build anything. This definitely gives me an advantage as an artist. I think that, like most of us, we are not one-dimensional people and possess many experiences and skills which contribute to our understanding and development of anything we participate in.

When I think about what I am creating in the studio now, I can help think about art and building and maybe a little about architecture, or more specifically about the space between things, whether it be buildings or layers of paper. The current body of work I have been creating for the past three years began when I started exploring ideas on what the Cubists did by manipulating the flat picture plane. This led me to look at ways to “build” my art and how space was considered and created between all its compositional elements and layers rather than laying material down flat on a 2-D surface – in reality, it’s kind of like how we walk through and experience the world and all its advertising constructs like signs, surface, billboards and even the many windows open on our computer screens. In this sense what I’m doing now leans in the direction of a built art.

Tm Gratkowski | From Fear To You | 2024

Your works have been featured in exhibitions ranging from Documenta in Detroit to the El Paso Biennial. How do different audiences respond to your exploration of culture and waste?

That’s an interesting thought/ question. This may be a backwards way of answering your question, but I think I would be making different work if I was living in another country other than the US but I would not be making it differently. I try to focus on subjects that are universally shared and understood, but I would definitely be adjacently influenced by where I was living, kind of like how Rauschenberg was making work all over the world through ROCI and it changed based on where he was.

Generally my art practice tries to focus on a universal point of view where the humanity in all of us look at most things in the same way. My work can and has definitely focused on very specific cultural centric points of view, but I am never trying to delegate a message. My work tries to focus on a subject we are all trying to better understand in one way or another. What I think my work does best is it sets up a universal platform for a dialogue or a conversation to take place. As long as it is a subject matter we are all engaged with and gets us thinking and asking questions then I think the work has been well received and we are all trying to better understand each other’s point of view and engage in a dialogue about it. So, to answer your question… I think it has received universal acceptance and understanding if at least by the conversations it has generated.

Tm Gratkowski | Lost And Found | 2025

Many of your pieces carry a sense of density and visual overload. Are you aiming to mirror the information saturation of contemporary society?

Well, it’s definitely a critical commentary on it. And yes, we are all part of it whether or not we like it. As an artist I am appreciating and influenced by the scenery and technology. The layering is about the system overload we are surrounded by all day long and the multiple devices open on our computers- what are we really paying attention to? Like Blade Runner, we now seem to be living inside the environment we are looking at. What I am trying to do is simplify the noise by mimicking the same visual patterns as if they were all overlapping in a similar manner, but in a more aesthetically appealing way to get you to slow down long enough to see what I see.

Tm Gratkowski | Pulp Romance | 2024

Your collages sometimes incorporate recognizable imagery from consumer culture. Do you see these works as a critique of consumerism, or as a way to document its visual language?

Both, but it’s definitely documenting, even mimicking, a visual pattern language I recognize. I like to call it a social anthropology of information and images. For the work to be relevant, I believe, it must talk about and use the environment or culture in which it came from to make sense.  I’m not trying to paint a landscape or create an anachronistic Surrealist collage trope to convince you I’m trying to talk about the world we live in today and how and what information is being disseminated. In a lot of ways it is about an awareness to look at this information clutter in a different way and to consume a different kind of knowledge – one that makes you think or question what you are looking at.

Can you talk about your use of color palettes—such as the dominant reds, greens, and greys seen in your recent works? What do these chromatic choices symbolize for you?

Color is such a difficult process for me. Not to be misrepresented, but I’m really good with color- the science of color and color theory, but I prefer things more monochromatic, especially when making art, specifically when using many different random pieces of paper to make art. I feel when I minimize the palette it is easier to hold your attention and to create a mood for the subject matter or message to be more appropriate. When I started this new series I’ve been working on for the past three years now, I told myself I wanted to use more dominant bold colors. A lot of the color choices were derived from a color palette I developed before I even started the larger pieces that I am currently working on now – it was kind of a goal or focus.

I was primarily interested in focussing on a designer color palette that was not a local or primary color. I quickly looked at developing more complex depth to those choices.

In the end and started looking at various color chakras. This seemed to fit well with the subject matter I’ve been focusing on about energy shifts between individuals or groups of people/ cultures. They are still work in progress so the exploration and experimenting continues.