The young Cracow artist, Piotr Jaros exhibited three photo-installations in Budapest, Umarmen I – II and Triumph. Jaros started to work with large black-and-white staged photography in 1994–95. Earlier he was busy with highly intellectual and conceptual installations. The subtitle of Umarmen is "The Miracle of Seeing" and the medieval German Word refers to the person who has managed to return from battle or war. The further meaning is embracement and graceful receiving of someone. Jaros deals with human situations, secret and oppressed emotions and symbolizes them with his figures who represent different characters. His hero is a young man who has suffered from serious operations and the other figures all his friends. ln case of Umarmen II Piotr Jaros has made life-size plastic sculptures of his figures and confronts the two-dimensional image with the Madam Tussaud -figures. This gesture makes us to think about reality, the problems of representation and the strength of the symbols. The Triumph goes even further: he invents irony, the critical view revealing the possessive nature of the human being. The heads closed to the glass balls refer to the lamps of a photo studio but also remind us to the astronauts' helmet. Piotr Jaros was born in 1965 in Myslenice, Poland and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Krakow in 1989.
