Rafał Zajko at The Arsenal Gallery, Białystok

“The Egg Egg” is a solo exhibition by Rafał Zajko, a visual artist born in Białystok and currently based in London. His multidisciplinary practice spans ceramics, sculpture, installation, fresco, video, performance, and elements of design. The exhibition brings together works created over the past eight years with selected pieces from the collection of Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok. These include paintings from the collection “Three Streams. Realism – Metaphor – Geometry”, works by participants of the Białowieża plein-air workshops, and artworks by Białystok-based artists. Within this context, the collection becomes a starting point for creative reinterpretation. Placed in dialogue with Zajko’s works, and connected through formal, narrative, and iconographic affinities, these juxtapositions generate new, speculative narratives on the mythology of place and the circulation of forms, symbols, and memories.

The exhibition builds on the artist’s first institutional presentation in the United Kingdom,“Spin Off”, shown in spring 2025 at Focal Point Gallery. Alongside works from the “Spin Off” series, it presents pieces from “Clocking Off”, which reinterpret industrial space through machine-like sculptures that combine the language of industry with organic elements and memories of childhood in Poland. The exhibition also features ceramic works from the “Bread and Milk” series, the diploma installation “Amber Chamber”, a “chochoł” (a straw figure), housed within a ventilated, futuristic cryochamber, and a selection of smaller objects and fragments from earlier series, reconfigured into new constellations.

The exhibition’s title, “The Egg Egg”, alludes both to a recurring symbol in the artist’s practice and to a play on words linking his surname with its Polish counterpart (Zajko – jajko). This reference becomes the starting point for a self-reflexive and subversive dialogue with his own work, biography, and the Arsenal collection. Zajko approaches the egg as an archetype tied to cyclicality, the circulation of matter, life and death. Themes of repetition, circularity, and rotational movement permeate the artist’s projects. His practice engages with electrical circuits, agrarian cycles, systems of labour, and the relations between the body and the machine.“The Egg Egg” thus completes a cycle. It marks Rafał Zajko’s return to Białystok and represents the first extensive presentation of his work in Poland. Conceived as a carefully calibrated mechanism, the exhibition rearticulates the place through a renewed narrative.