MARLENA KUDLICKA
ELEMENTS OF PEACEFUL ENGAGEMENT
Opening: Friday, 15 September 2017 from 6 to 9pm
ŻAK | BRANICKA is pleased to present in the frame of Berlin Art Week, the new solo show of Marlena Kudlicka Elements of Peaceful Engagement.
The exhibition Elements of Peaceful Engagement is an attempt to redefine the concept of sculpture in light of questions relating to the physical and mental process of its creation and its relation to space. The title refers to a person’s character or a strategic system that merges with office standards, which in turn, tailors a decision making process. The series of sculptures and sculptural collages created by Marlena Kudlicka take the viewer back to the avant-garde tradition of constructivism and the subsequent practice of the Polish avant-garde. Nevertheless, in her way of understanding the particularity of sculpture and its function in space, the artist draws more deeply from the history and tradition of this medium.
Marlena Kudlicka’s work is based on the space she describes as the “container of counterpoints”. She sees it as an objective frame, such as a grid or a technical drawing. Enriched nonetheless by a formal artistic gesture, her perception takes on a subjective nature. The space around Kudlicka’s sculpture thus becomes a place of mental processes – projection, communication, reception – and the so-called counterpoints that form space become the bases of the mechanisms of understanding and of action of the human being in space.
The universal language of mathematics used by the artist captures space in a perceptible form, showing the dynamics that occur between the work and the viewer. This process named by Robert Morris “the present tense of space” emphasizes the immediacy of its experience and the consciousness of its reception.
Kudlicka’s works rethink form as a technical protocol, where numbers and other mathematical symbols explain the parameters of a given idea. Like an identification plate, the sculpture explains the origin and the meaning of the artistic gestures and the decisions contained in the closed space of the exhibition space.
based in Anna Tomczak’s text for the exhibition sugar in the ashes. Official Capacity at LaBF 15, Lyon, FR