Opening Hours
Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm
Gallery
Art Agenda Nova
Batorego 2, Krakow
Artist
Małgorzata Markiewicz
ABOUT EXHIBITION
Body tightening requires haste in action, precision and self-control. During performing post-mortem masks, the torn features, closed eyelids and lips of the deceased were fixed. There were additional wrinkles and depressions that were not on his face during his lifetime. After dressing and polishing, the plaster or wax negative served as a model for a sumptuous monument or memorial commemorative. Cultural history was accompanied by persistent attempts to stop the body: mummification, embalming, smoking, caring rubbing each piece of skin with special substances. In various processes from dead tissues, water and fat were usually removed, which stopped their decomposition. The corpses remained dry in this way. Deprived of fluid and stiffened, exposed organ machinery designed in perfect order. Perfectly packed in a leather bag.
Małgorzata Markiewicz often referred to the problem of immobilizing the body in her work. She sank dresses into concrete sarcophagi, tied colorful balls of wool and felt, tied on strings or put them in a crate. She wrapped her blankets or wool around concrete cubes. It warmed and softened what was angular, stiff, uncomfortable. The clothing fascinated her always as a temporary, daily form for the body, absorbing its fluids and fragrances, the other skin. In the new cycle of works that captures fragments of the bodies that are invaluable to her, the artist decided to reach for plasticine, degraded and childlike material. Soft portraits were created, encouraging kneading and grinding between the fingers.
In this case, black plasticine is not a transitional stage, but an end in itself. From everyday experience, it is known how difficult it is to scrape it from a rug or carpet. Hair and dust quickly adhere to it. It’s easy to get disgusting. The use of this low, declassed matter brings to mind what is earthy, dead, tombstone. Plasticine sweats like a body. It means traces of its presence with damp shapes. In the bas-reliefs, Markiewicz emits fat, seeping into the other side of the page to which they have been glued. Staining, it reminds you of uncomfortable and embarrassing corporeality.
Just like the clothes worn out in the artist’s work, the plasticine has encoded in its shape memories of the body, especially its warmth. It remembers the strength of her hands kneading, fingerprint layout, nail marks. It is susceptible to changes. It deforms like a broken bone or bruised skin.
As in the case of sewing, crocheting or knitting, molding from plasticine seems to be a trivial activity, a filler of time, a calming mantra for the fingers. Markiewicz pours his fears and feelings onto these small, soft forms. During the process of creation, he struggles with the obsessions he gives shapes. He finds a comfortable outlet for them. Creation is here at the same time giving birth and spitting out.
The artist puts a schematic on the paper a plasticine tree, horse, house, sun, man and mountain. Black silhouettes create the impression of well-known, home-made. They make up the imagination of the viewer into a whole. Like the broken tablet, whose halves represented in antiquity the hallmark of two people who connected some complementary bond, the forms stuck on the pages by Markiewicz bring out the impressions and shapes that the viewer had only foggy feeling. In these matrices, he reads his own shapes, completes details, stuffs with memorized images. Black forms suck his memory, collect fuzzy fragments, compare and stick to each other.
Like all negatives, they encourage you to fulfill. They tempt with a guarantee to recreate the original. Thanks to them, the bodies of loved ones and the most-loved ones could be preserved. You could call them from scratch like a photo in a darkroom. To bring life to life, from scratch.
The plasticine matrix resembles different bodies – objects. They have a foot with red nails painted on the edge of the sunbed. A piece of unburnt skin exposed under the armpit or on the stomach with unruly loose clothes. A breast seen by accident, which is usually hidden in the bus. A sweaty hand that slides out lazily from squeezing me at farewell. hands.
Black plasticine remains in this ritual of reminding something unexplored, unspecified, unknown. It enforces attention and focus. Its use makes the Markiewicz bas-reliefs charred. As if they were supposed to break under the fingers when touched. As the ruins of a forgotten culture are very susceptible to destruction. They stratify and crumble like a blackened volume. They resist attempts at any penetration. They do not want to undergo any examination and verification.
Marta Lisok
MAŁGORZATA MARKIEWICZ (1979)
1999-2004 – Studies and diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow
Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2004). HIAP Resident, Cable Factory, Finland, as part of the A-I-R Laboratory project at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (2006), and a resident of SPACES, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (2007)
Małgorzata Markiewicz creates objects, sculptures, photographs, installations and performances.
In her works, she uses various materials, uses clothes, embroidery, knitwork, crochet, and combines them with raw concrete and metal constructions.
In her work, he analyzes the nearest everyday life. She is interested in traces of life, emotions that store clothes and materials – the closest witnesses of our bodies. The body in her works is not a field of cultural struggle but a man – changes, emotions that take place in him.
Since 2002, she regularly presents her works in galleries in Poland and abroad.
Her works can be found in collections: CCB Lisbon, MOCAK, Krakow, Museum of Contemporary Art in Niepołomice, Galeria Arsenał in Białystok, BWA in Bielsko Biała, BWA Bunkier Sztuki and others and in a number of private collections in Poland and abroad.
www.malgorzatamarkiewicz.com