Iza Tarasewicz at Gunia Nowik Gallery

Artist: Iza Tarasewicz

Exhibition title: Full Circle Ahead!

Venue: Gunia Nowik Gallery, Warsaw, Poland

Date: July 3 – September 11, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery

The self-reference of signs, the self-applicability of principles, the self-justification and self-refutation of propositions and inferences, the self-creation and self-destruction of legal and logical entities, the self-limitation and self-augmentation of powers, circular reasoning, circular causation, vicious and benign circles, feedback systems, mutual dependency, reciprocity and organic form.

from “The Anatomy of Reflexivity” by Peter Suber

Iza Tarasewicz lives and works on her family farm in Kolonia Koplany, a village in the Podlasie region of eastern Poland. Surrounded by farm animals and fowl, and old farming equipment that her grandparents once operated, her life is directly linked to the natural world and its seasonal rhythms. This rural context is evident in her practice and the materials she uses, and directly reflected in her sculptures, installations and drawings.

Over the past few years, she has been exploring the mazurka, a style of folk dancing rooted in the physical movements of life in the countryside. Pairs of dancers are arranged in a circle, simultaneously spinning around their own axes as they travel the circumference. The whirring parts – if we look at them schematically – are reminiscent of the work of machines or even celestial bodies in transit. The multiplicity of meanings held by the figure of a circle or sphere can be found in Tarasewicz’s works, for instance, in her sculpture Flowing in Waves Towards Equilibrium, which currently floats above the staircase at the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The piece presents a diagram of an encounter that has been transplanted into the realm of digits and geometric forms.

In Full Circle Ahead! we also enter the circular realm of cycles with yet another sort of encounter. Tarasewicz has returned, after a number of years, to the metaphor of the body. These new forms are human-like: with discernable heads, shoulders, four-fingered hands. And yet, these figures are more machine-like than human. The elements in these pieces are multiplicitous and cumulative. The spinning spheres, the shapes that taper into a human limb, refer to a collective spirit of work and the power vested in community – albeit a power subjugated by the course of the pandemic over recent months. Made by hand independently or in collaboration with local craftsmen, these objects reflect Tarasewicz’s laudatory view of physical work in an increasingly automated world. The energy created hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder falls into a cyclical rhythm that harmonizes with the turn of the seasons and the natural laws that govern the universe.

Full Circle Ahead! is the inaugural exhibition of the Gunia Nowik Gallery, marking the beginning of many things to come!