August 30 – September 30
Presented at WL4, the second installment of the exhibition celebrating Małgorzata Żerwe’s 70th birthday and her 50 years of creative presence on the Tricity cultural scene, this exhibition is devoted to a single, yet fundamental, area of the artist’s work: large-format artistic textiles. Created in the 1980s and 1990s, the works from the series “Ornats,” “Reliefs,” and “Walls” form a dynamic installation that engages in a dialogue with the architecture of the brick building of Milky Peter, located on the edge of the Imperial Shipyard.
In 1979, at the atelier of Professor Józefa Wnukowa at the State Higher School of Visual Arts (now the Academy of Fine Arts) in Gdańsk, Żerwe was one of the first to defend her diploma in artistic textiles as a leading discipline. Her continued explorations in this medium resulted in monumental woven works, where the evolution of her perception of space and light is evident. Over time, the majestic “Ornats,” inspired by historical liturgical vestments, took on increasingly lighter and more luminous forms, as seen in the “Reliefs” and “Walls,” embodying both external and internal landscapes.
Both the heavy “Ornats” and the fleshy “Reliefs,” along with the more open-worked “Walls” featuring a thickened structure—reimagined at WL4 in the evocative spatial-sound installation “Jungle”—are each given their final shape through the process of wet hand molding. The plasticity of the fiber allows for the mobility of these compositions and a wide range of exhibition variants, as noted by Irena Huml in her text Fiber Art – Encounters in Time (1994).
“Working with fabric is like a mantra,” says Żerwe. It is a record of gesture, often an almost automatic and subconscious sequence of movements. In this sense, the tactile nature of the medium transforms it into a performative art form, gravitating towards three-dimensionality and autonomy. Through this process, abstract woven forms resonate with contemporary content, becoming vehicles for non-verbal communication with the viewer and the modern world.
