The exhibition “Through Veins and Shadows” reflects on the experience of time and its inevitable passage. While the body becomes a tool of perception, matter reveals itself as an active component of reality, remaining in constant dialogue with lived experience, memory, the urgency of the present moment, and projections into the future.
The artistic practices of Konrad Krzyżanowski and Joanna Wierzbicka can be understood as two complementary approaches to materiality and time. Both artists are interested in the fluidity of boundaries. Their work focuses on what unfolds between interior and exterior, between the human and the non-human, as well as between accumulated layers of time and what feels urgent in the here and now. Through painting and sculpture, they reveal the sensitive, reactive, and distinctly porous nature of human experience.
Konrad Krzyżanowski’s works encourage the viewer to confront the unstable and only partially graspable nature of recollection, where memories emerge as landscapes existing beyond linear time. A subtle tension arises between nostalgia and unease, between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Drawing from personal archives and found imagery, Krzyżanowski constructs visual narratives suspended between certainty and ambiguity, touching upon fragility, transience, and the potential of images as carriers of meaning.
In this sense, his practice may be associated with the work of writer and innovator William S. Burroughs. Burroughs is known for constructing raw, often unsettling visions of reality and for his influence on experimental narrative, particularly through the cut-up technique, understood here as a method of fragmenting and reassembling images. Similarly, in Krzyżanowski’s work, autobiographical elements, constructed narratives, and found imagery overlap and permeate one another, creating a discontinuous, layered visual structure that recalls a distinctly Dadaist sensibility.
At the same time, the artist expands this model by introducing a collective and cultural dimension, filtered through the sensitivity and imagination of his own generation. He addresses themes connected to queerness, male vulnerability, and the questioning of heteronormative codes. In this way, an autobiographical narrative also emerges, touching upon identity, affirmation, and social relations.
Joanna Wierzbicka places emphasis on the materiality of the body and the active agency of matter. Her practice, centred primarily on sculpture but also encompassing photography and installation, draws on fabrics, second-hand clothing, and organic materials as tools for examining life processes and the ways memory becomes embodied. Her sculptures combine fragility and weight, evoking organic and unsettling forms such as intestines, appendages, organisms, or branching structures reminiscent of the vascular system. This visual language brings her work close to the aesthetics of body horror. In Wierzbicka’s practice, matter likewise becomes a carrier of inevitable transformation. Its vulnerability reflects tensions, revealing how material conditions structure the emergence of perception and meaning.
The newest works presented in the exhibition take the form of metal floor sculptures that evoke skeletal structures and embryonic organisms. Much like Krzyżanowski’s paintings, Wierzbicka’s sculptures can be understood as bodies undergoing transformation – captured at a moment of transition, when identity begins to fracture and the boundaries between the intimate and the shared start to dissolve.
Presented together, the practices of these two artists create a dialogue grounded in the interpenetration of different orders and realities. Krzyżanowski undertakes a journey backwards, deconstructing memory through images, while Wierzbicka renders it visible as an embodied process inscribed within matter itself. Although their approaches differ radically, both artists examine the permeability of boundaries, revealing how time and experience manifest simultaneously as subjective and collective, aesthetic and corporeal processes.
