Olaf Brzeski
26 November 2015 – 28 January 2015
Polish Institute Gallery
The Polish Institute in Berlin presents Olaf Brzeski’s exhibition Vorraum/Przedsionek (“Anteroom”). It is on display from the 26th November 2015 to 28th January 2016.
Brzeski’s Anteroom links between the world of second-order and first-order realities. The works presented become the threshold between potentiality and factuality, life and afterlife, between the temporal and the eternal.
Anteroom is divided into two sections – the first presents homemade masks while the second is filled with an oversized expressionist shadow in the form of an architectural cardboard model.
The masks produced together with Brzeski’s 5-year-old son imitate the face coverings of superheroes such as Ironman, Captain America, Batman and many others. They are a symbolic path from childhood to adulthood and represent a conductor of culturally-constructed rites of passage. The masks obscure the subject’s individual identity and at the same time provide him with the illusion of a new personality.
The shadow that dominates the second section spatialises the boy’s stretched silhouette and transforms it into a theatrical mock-up of a domestic anteroom.