Bogdan Achimescu
Bogdan Achimescu during a performance at KTO Theatre

I think by drawing and speaking.

You hear my voice and see analogue projections, the shadow of a hand and brush, a line in motion. In my latest works, drawing unfolds live alongside an autobiographical narrative.

photo: Monika Bielak

2026

[…] and I Want to Serve My Country

performance · KTO Theatre, Kraków · Aktomar · 30 minutes

photo: Monika Bielak

I talk about being forced to live in a mechanised infantry unit: about real and feigned illnesses, bribes, and a soldier dragged through the snow behind a trolleybus. The backdrop is compulsory military service in Romania during the final years of communism.

I speak and draw at the same time. Images cast by four analogue projectors overlap or join into panoramas. At times they form freeze-frames of sequential motion. I made use of the theatrical setting, although the story itself is intimate enough for a late evening on a terrace. Perhaps that is why there was so much laughter.

photo: Monika Bielak

2025

Museum Night,Evening of Minds

four one-hour drawing-and-narrative modules · Casa Artei, Timișoara

During Museum Night, for four hours I drew and spoke about the Romanian Revolution of 1989, in which I took part. The four sections were titled: Un rucsac, o țuică și o pufoaică — A Backpack, Moonshine and a Puffer Jacket; Traducem sau inventăm? — Do We Translate or Invent?; Beție — Intoxication; Senator repetent, portar agitator — A Senator Repeats a Year, a Doorman Agitates.

The audience were residents of Timișoara, the city I was speaking about. For older viewers the story stirred memories; to younger ones, a visitor from Kraków described a world they had never known. The event took place as votes were being counted in simultaneous presidential elections in Poland and Romania. A story from decades ago unfolded in the shadow of that night’s political tension.

2025

Brâncuși: Sculpting with Light / […] on Travel, Love and Method

wall drawings and a performative lecture · International Cultural Centre, Kraków

Wall drawings

For an exhibition of photographs by Constantin Brâncuși and his friends Man Ray and Edward Steichen, I made two drawn “X-rays” of Brâncuși’s creative mechanisms. The first led towards primary forms—zigzags and arches found in woodcarving and stonework, but also towards the observation of bodies and plants. The second reconstructed on a map of Europe the routes the artist travelled on foot in search of work and an artistic milieu.

photo: Grzesiek Mart

[…] on Travel, Love and Method

I combined documented stories with apocrypha from Brâncuși’s life. Through drawing, I introduced a photograph of his son that was absent from the exhibition. In the second part, I related this world to my own life, work, roots and experience of migration. I spoke while drawing and activating successive images with analogue projectors placed around the gallery.

2019

460 Passengers

series of 460 drawings and texts · the publication Capacity, Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków Press · shown in “Unelte și Pasageri”, Pygmalion Gallery, Timișoara, 2025

The series consists of 460 hybrid figures—mixtures of humans, animals, mythological characters and technical constructs—drawn on narrow wooden slats. Each can speak through its own text. These brief monologues resemble testimonies, advertisements, instructions, complaints and private confessions by beings whose bodies, memory and identity are subject to modification, exchange and administrative control.

The slats form a reconfigurable library, always ready for new proximities among the passengers.

The book Capacity, published by the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków Press in 2019, is a parallel form of the work. It pairs a selection of drawings with texts, showing that language is not a caption beneath a figure but part of its construction. The series was shown at Jan Fejkiel Gallery in Kraków in 2019 and at Pygmalion Gallery in Timișoara in the 2025 exhibition “Unelte și Pasageri”.

Open the PDF book

2017

Empty House

drawing, photography · Porto Palermo, Albania

I drew on the walls of an abandoned building—a former fishermen’s house displaced by predatory development near Porto Palermo. Without a commission, permission or audience, I placed fragments of a fictional traditional life inside it.

I invented a man named Velip—a blind drunk—and showed an abundance of olives and other food, along with a contented dog. The original work and the building no longer exist; photographs remain.

2020

March of the Animals to Kraków

animation and projection in public space · Pieszymaj project, Tetmajera Street, Kraków

During the pandemic, the city turned off street lighting at night, either to save energy or discourage us from going outside. I then noticed wild animals returning from nearby meadows and forests to the streets of Kraków.

From the studio windows I projected a procession of mutants—imaginary creatures on the border of microbiology and genetic engineering. The drawings were made collectively by me, my children and the neighbours’ children. The street became the screen, and passers-by the audience.

2015–2020

A Mountain of Gear

ink on paper, drawing installation · BWA Sokół / MOCAK

The twenty-metre panorama depicts plants, mountaineering equipment and industrial devices taking control of the mountains. A drawn narrative runs along the unrolled strip of paper, while individual scenes combine into an image of expansion, use and appropriation of the landscape.

The work developed over an extended period. I showed an earlier, evolving version at BWA Sokół in Nowy Sącz in 2015. In 2020 it was presented at MOCAK in the exhibition “Artists from Kraków: The 1950–1969 Generation”.

2016

Drowned Men at the Antipodes

drawing and installation · SACO Biennial, Muelle Salitrero, Antofagasta, Chile

On the railings of Muelle Salitrero I installed drawings of figures immersed in water. It is unclear whether they are holidaymakers or migrants. The pier now serves walkers, but was once the main terminal for Chilean saltpetre shipped to Europe, including Poland.

The work connects this history of the site with the dual use of saltpetre—as fertiliser and explosive—and with the social costs of its extraction. Industry, capital, violence, migration by land and sea, and the transformation of former infrastructure into a tourist attraction converge in one place.

1991–2010

Third City

drawing and installation · St Benedict’s Fort / Cricoteka / Dunlop Gallery

“Third City” is a series of several thousand drawings depicting pairs of profiles gazing at one another. They were made on thin tissue paper as two-handed drawings—the left hand drew the left face, the right hand the right. I began the work in 1991 and continued it until 2010.

Its first presentation was an installation at St Benedict’s Fort in Kraków in 1993. In 2009 I showed it in a solo exhibition in Cricoteka’s industrial building on Nadwiślańska Street. A year later, the installation appeared in the public library space in Regina, in the exhibition “Diabolique” at Dunlop Gallery.

“Third City” represents an earlier model of my practice: an image built through overproduction, seriality and variation, before autobiographical narrative moved to the foreground.

About

I draw to understand and to tell stories. I explain things to myself through drawing; when an image needs time and context, I speak.

For years I built vast collections: thousands of anonymous, mutable faces. I assembled them into installations and spatial panoramas, inventing synthetic mythologies for them. Now I am more drawn to the role of witness. I like telling family anecdotes and stories of my own. I return to growing up in another country and another time, to migration and to my personal history.

I tell stories and draw live. Analogue projectors allow images to appear, overlap and disappear. They are not illustrations. Words correct drawings; lines challenge words. I prefer small gatherings because they leave room for improvisation, conversation and the uncertainty of memory. We can laugh, because I have had enough of fear.

Biography

Bogdan Achimescu was born in Timișoara, where he attended an art high school, and later studied art in Cluj and Kraków. He works with drawing, installation, text, projection and performance, exploring the relationships between image, personal memory and history.

He participated in the Context Network project at the Romanian Pavilion of the 2001 Venice Biennale. His works and projects have been presented at venues including The Drawing Center in New York, Model Arts Centre in Sligo, Cricoteka and MOCAK in Kraków, and the International Cultural Centre. His work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence.

He is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and heads the Drawing Studio in the Faculty of Intermedia.