Artist: Małgorzata Kręcka-Rozenkranz
Curator: Grażyna Tomaszewska
Vernissage: 8 December 2023. 6.00 PM – 9.00 PM
Duration: 8 December 2022 to 25 February 2024
Venue: Günter Grass City Gallery, Szeroka 37
Visual identification: Gosia Golińska
“Six Cities of Refuge” is a site-specific project, evolving since 2020 – the point at which present reality started accelerating dramatically, thus providing it with new contexts. The exhibition refers to the cities of refuge rooted in Hebrew tradition – places , where the perpetrator of accidental manslaughter could find refuge from the vengeance of the victim’s relatives. Following the law, the victim should be avenged by their closest male relative: Avenger of Blood. This particular right to find asylum and immunity when hunted by forthcoming tragedy can be found in Exodus, the Book of Numbers and Deuteronomy. According to the artist: “I had a clear vision of the construct , the idea was ready. However, 2020 confronted me with the necessity of revising my previous assumptions. In the meantime, our presumably stable reality has been shaken by an unexpected course of events, that proved my evolving artistic statement inadequate. The process of engaging in a dialogue with permanently present variable seemed endless. In the end, I concluded that only ideal utopian cities can meet the conditions of cities-asylums. Those refuges from the madness of the world rendering external spaces of negotiation replacing the previous ones that have lost their value. Provisional homelands of the nomads of this world. Reseted cities”.
Since her graduation Małgorzata Kręcka-Rozenkranz has been working at the AoFA in Gdańsk. A professor at the Academy she heads the Studio of the Basics of Artistic Design at the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia. In her work she focuses on drawing and sculpture. Her works have been exhibited at numerous individual and group exhibitions. The sixfold stay of the artist in Haiti between 2011 and 2013 was associated with establishing and running the Fonte d’Aluminium sculpting studio in Jacmel. It’s programme was developed in cooperation with Solidarite Haitienne des Artistes Plasticienes oraz L’Alliance Francaise de Jacmel. The project was aimed to support the artists stricken by the dramatic earthquake of 2010.
The exhibition of Małgorzata Kręcka-Rozenkranz belongs to the Logos-Bios cycle inviting those sculptors whose works analyse and confront the interface between culture and nature. The realm of chaos representing biology and that of logos standing for order, human interference and apparently symbolic oppression.
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