Piotr Uklanski

Pornalikes is a book of portraits with a difference. Culling his materials from a 2002–2018 photo archive of porn actors who resemble or actually even portray celebrities and public figures, Polish artist Piotr Uklanski (born 1968) draws on men’s magazines such as Hustler and Loaded, as well as meme-culture material from websites and blogs, to assemble this challenging take on portraiture and celebrity . In Pornalikes Uklanski subverts the original expectations of traditional art-historical portraiture, exploring the pop-cultural tensions between sexual identity and exploitation, man and woman, fiction and reality and challenging both easy moral parameters and good taste. Pornalikes picks up where his cult series The Nazis and Real Nazis, also published by Edition Patrick Frey, left off.

Celebrated Polish-born artist Piotr Uklanski (born 1968) established himself in the mid-1990s with a diverse body of work examining the ever-changing relationship between identity, history and culture.

Continuing this investigation, Uklanski’s new book, Ottomania, traces the phenomenon of Orientalist portraiture over the past 500 years. This book contains over 200 paintings, drawings, prints and photography—images of men in turbans, theatrically embellished masculine dress, richly decorated fabrics, the codification of facial hair and the romantic settings of Ottoman or Persian court life—from Rembrandt, Zurbarán, Liotard, Tiepolo, Rubens, Delacroix, Schiele, Matisse, Picasso, de Chirico, Dalí, Balthus and Leonor Fini.

Uklanski orders the works roughly by theme, demonstrating how Western artists exploited key Orientalist signifiers, in dress, setting and pose, in order to portray their sitters—men, women and children—as worldly, romantic and in other ways exotic.

In the fall of 1999, Edition Patrick Frey published Piotr Uklanski's artist book, The Nazis, which quickly went out of print and became a highly coveted cult book. Whereas The Nazis collected stills of actors playing Nazis in various Hollywood movies, Uklanksi's new book, Real Nazis, juxtaposes them with the real thing: Nazi party bigwigs, decorated "war heroes" and war criminals. Painstakingly culled from a variety of archives, this follow-up compilation superimposes fact upon fiction: the stagey, propagandistic imagery of the Third Reich is mixed in with the Nazi iconography of Hollywood, revealing an uncanny, even spooky, resemblance between the play-acting and real-life exponents of evil. Designed with the same format and production values as its predecessor, Real Nazis asks who are the "real" Nazis in this picture puzzle? What is a bona fide Nazi? Which pictures are "real" and which are "fake?" This hall of mirrors serves as a radical commentary on our alarming current condition, in which the lines between populist and fascistic politics are increasingly blurring. Then as now, "Beneath all the insignia and accoutrements of evil lurks the iconography of media kitsch and ridicule. It's all about the power of costumes and the costumes of power, about the glamour of evil, the glistening shine of fake medals made of fake gold."