About the Artist: Maciek Peter Kozlowski
Maciek "Magic" Peter Kozlowski is a Canadian contemporary artist working in mixed media, painting, assembly, sculpture and new media. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1958 and raised in Ottawa, where he still lives and works, he has been making art for more than three decades.
His first lessons in seeing came from his grandmother, herself an artist, who taught him to find characters and scenes in ordinary surfaces — the cracks in an old pink bathtub among them. That habit of attention runs through the work still. Figures, faces and landscapes surface inside his abstracts, and viewers frequently find forms the artist did not consciously place there.
He describes his process as working from the subconscious and trying to "get out of the way" — letting emotion emerge in the piece rather than imposing a plan on it. It is an unusual method for someone trained as an engineer, though that training shows in the execution: his mixed media works are built in layers on aluminum panel and finished in thick acrylic, giving a depth and glass-like surface that photographs rarely capture.
Exhibitions and Awards
- Artist of the Year, United Kingdom, 2017 (artistsinfo.co.uk and Daler-Rowney)
- GAIA Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, 2024
- Riverdale Art Walk, Toronto, 2025
- Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, 2016
- Ottawa New Art Festival, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
- Nepean Fine Arts League Show, 2014–2017 — Judge's 1st Place Best of Show and 1st Place Multimedia, 2016
- Red Trillium Studio Tour, West Carleton, 2009–2019
- West End Studio Tour, 2018, 2019, 2021–2024
- Toronto Art Expo, 2009 · Ottawa Art Expo, 2014
- "Surveillance" exhibition, In the Air Guild, Ottawa, 2019–2020
- Solo exhibition of Assembly pieces, Origin Trade, Ottawa
- Eight Awards of Excellence, including four Canadian national awards for multimedia communications applications
- Member, Federation of Canadian Artists
His work is held in private collections in Canada, the United States, Japan and Europe.
Current Work
His most recent original mixed media works on aluminum panel are gathered in Destinations of the Imagination, a collection of one-of-a-kind pieces including Revelation, Beautiful Toronto and Climate Past and Future. Each is signed on the back and supplied with a certificate of authenticity.