Natalia Karczewska at Stereo

Artist: Natalia Karczewska

Exhibition title: A fine flip over

Venue: Stereo, Warsaw, Poland

Date: September 5 – 26, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Stereo

While looking at the wardrobe, I saw figures forming in its tree rings. One of them had enormous feet. I projected her weight onto myself, imagining that I had wooden legs and I could not get up. Simple synaesthesia made me feel wooden and thus endowed with some miraculous potency/impotence, at least something inhuman.

Like many similar author statements, the above clearly suggests that Natalia Karczewska’s creative process consists of some kind of disruption of perception, in which the direction of movement is determined by chance, and the content of thoughts is dictated by complex emotions.

Admittedly, in her work, the artist relies on found objects, i.e. objects with a set shape and that bear the features of a mysterious history, but she transforms them according to her whim. In this way, she frees them from the meanings assigned to them and thus claims [their] ownership. Interestingly, in its formal aspect, this act consists of something like applying a bandage. Natalia’s sculptures are sometimes wrapped in cloth, but often also covered with fragments of drawings of various sizes.

These, in turn, often resemble mysterious signs, unknown letters, foreign words. As if the act of renaming was, in the author’s opinion, an act of violence, the effect of which should be compensated for with a gesture of care. The interdependence of other oppositions, such as excitement and despondency, pleasure and pain, movement and stagnation, finds visual reflection in Natalia’s works in stretched forms, whether with the help of a steel rod, string or thread, sometimes reminiscent of a hand covering as large an area as possible.

At the heart of this work is the voracious experiencing of experiences and the intention to constantly reconfigure relations with the material world.