...paintings are not fixed images but records of a process that continues beyond my control
— Paul Czerlitzki
Paul Czerlitzki (b. 1986, Gdańsk) is a Polish painter known for a conceptual and process-based approach to painting that foregrounds duration, material accumulation, and contingency. His ongoing RELAY series, initiated in 2019, is based on a principle of passive authorship: white primed canvases are placed on the studio floor for extended periods, where they register airborne pigment produced during the making of other works. The resulting surfaces are unfixed and fragile, and any changes caused by handling, transport, or installation are accepted as integral to the work’s history.
Czerlitzki studied from 2009 to 2014 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a master student of Katharina Grosse, an experience that shaped his sustained engagement with painting as an expanded, spatial, and material practice. His work can be situated within a broader discourse of contemporary painting that explores process, chance, and the redistribution of artistic control, and is often discussed in relation to artists such as Katharina Grosse, Wade Guyton, and Christopher Wool, whose practices similarly question authorship, surface, and production.
Czerlitzki presented his first solo exhibition with Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf in 2018. Since then, his work has been shown at major institutions including Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2020), Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, and Museum Wiesbaden (all 2019).
His work is held in several notable public and private collections, including the Federal Collection of Contemporary Art (Germany), Kunstmuseum Bonn, Fondation CAB, Brussels, the Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, and the Kadist Foundation, Paris.