EXHIBITION

Ziemia Rodzinna

Galeria Aleksander Bruno, Mazowieckie, Warsaw, 09/27/2014 - 12/21/2014

Bracka 3/1a

ABOUT

Agnieszka Brzezanska in her latest works stays close to the ground. She puts under a microscope clods of earth. The image that one can see in a big close-up is similar to the abstract one and resembles especially the organic abstraction. While the artist's gaze in contemplative  atmosphere is pointed at earth,  the public is also exposed to look at artist's works very carefully.

This is a new chapter in Brzezanka’s research, which is commonly focused on the alternative systems and realms that stay seemingly out of sight, undercover by dominant epistemologies. The harmony of the heavenly bodies, the secret relations of plants, the unfamiliar realm of germs - these are the fields in which the artist had already taken her artistic and semi-scientific researches.

 The artist's focus on earth briefly exposes the series of semantic tensions that emerge when we put the notion of „earth” in the cultural context. On one hand, the earth is almost a synonym of the pure matter, the beginning of all things, the material and  the cause, that can almost spontaneously create new entities.  On the other – the notion is burdened with huge symbolic surplus and is a favourite nutrient for every kind of ideological discourses.

 Brzezanska performs a subtly nostalgic but ironic gesture – the title of the exhibition refers to the album called „Motherland” that was published in Poland in the 50s and presented the series of black and white photographs praising „the beauty of Polish landscape”, and by this citation the artist tends to cast off that ideological burden. The aim of this publication was to create the sense of allegiance to the Polish state in its new, post-war  realities.

 Brzezanska distances herself from such identification. She goes deeper, to the more primary, material and organic necessity of the contact with the ground. The artist’s acts also point to the need of establishing the connection with the Slavic mythologies and their potential matriarchal shape,  with the central role of holistic and cyclical character of life. In reference to this aspect, exhibition will present the ceramic vessels that with its forms refers to the Lusatian culture. Here the soil, the clay is a matter of the work of art itself, as well as in the images where Brzezanska connotes the series of archaic, potentially magic symbols.

For More Information

APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Agnieszka Brzezanska

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