In Klaudia’s works, scattered objects dominate: papers, old handwritten letters, and notebooks. Artifacts of someone’s bygone life, an intimate existence, immersed in tall grasses or drifting in a shallow stream. Rusted keys that were once synonymous with power and order now lie useless, and the secrets they once guarded in locked drawers seem no longer to interest anyone. Klaudia creates a world where abandoned ruins and scattered remnants appear strangely alive, imbued with a surreal energy. The subdued, sometimes even gloomy color palette of the works confronts us with silence and emptiness, where our own existence ceases to be something extraordinary.
In one of Zuza’s paintings, we see a snow-covered shack barely holding on against the wind’s gusts. It’s a shelter for small insects, not much different from one we might build for ourselves. This makeshift, fragile form also appears in Klaudia’s work, depicting the wall of an old shed with gaps patched up with straw. The exhibition almost entirely lacks human figures, although we sense their presence and the effects of their activity. In the painting “Edward,” instead of a person, we see only the shadow of an elderly man with a stick slung over his shoulder. This motif also appears in Zuza’s work, where a sack suspended in space directly evokes thoughts about escaping from one’s current life. The reduced form of this composition inevitably prompts us to ask what we ourselves would want to take with us and what would be the most essential thing.
This metaphysical experience places each of us in the role of a wanderer who must embark on their own internal journey. In most of Zuza Piekoszewska’s works, the process of transformation becomes evident—an exploration of permanence and how objects change their meaning when they lose their original purpose. The artist’s abstract assemblages evoke a sense of nostalgia for something very simple; they are a matrix of early, childhood experiences with texture. Despite using very basic materials such as plaster, grass, and seeds, the works appear highly haptic. The exhibition is suffused with an atmosphere of unreality, as though we’ve entered another zone where we recognize things and objects reclaimed by nature, but they have now become creations of other energies.
“Gauge” remains a metaphor for a space where we are no longer able to control anything, where we are helpless in the face of the fact that we, too, are passing. The journey is over. Welcome to the inn of eternal helplessness.
/Przemek Sowiński
In cooperation with Łęctwo Gallery, Poznań
Zuza Piekoszewska (b. 1996)
A graduate of the University of the Arts in Poznań and the Academy of Art in Szczecin. Her works have been exhibited at venues such as Zachęta (2021), BWA Wrocław (2023), GIG Munich (2022), Who is Pola/Pola Magnetyczne (2024). She creates objects in which she explores the connections between humans and nature, focusing primarily on death and the decay of coexisting beings. Zuza has an extraordinary gift for sensing things that are not alive. Forms that seem frozen still pulse with a certain micro-activity, which becomes more perceptible the more time you spend observing them closely. At first glance, it might seem insignificant. However, Zuza’s works evoke memories and echoes of fundamental past energies, triggering that peculiar feeling when you become acutely aware of your own presence. To perceive this specific kind of emotion in things, you need distance. Objects must lose their original function and the meaning we assign to them in everyday experience. They then operate on the borderline between two worlds—rationality and uselessness, life and the taking of life. Zuza’s practice evokes, above all, a sense of passing, which never truly ends with death.
Klaudia Figura (b. 2000)
In my artistic practice, I mainly use sculpture and painting. I often make use of cheap and readily available materials: ready-mades, self-drying clay, epoxy resin, and so-called cold porcelain, a mass made up of potato starch and white glue. With this simple recipe, I manage to shape objects and ornaments that appear to be made from top shelf materials.
I also enjoy working with wood, metal, glass, and fabric. My fondness for DIY and craftsmanship stems directly from growing up in the countryside and the necessity of using various resources, as well as from learning traditional crafts. I am absorbed by stories of apparitions, aberrations, and whims of nature gathered directly from local anecdotes heard among family and friends.
I also find plenty of inspiration online, following questionable influencers, new-age TikTok witches, or simply watching short DIY videos with hacks for wood-resin tabletops. Through my creations I enjoy engaging in a formal play with the audience — between what is real and artificial, living and dead.
źródło: https://bwawarszawa.pl/skrajnia/
