Marta Branicka „Rose is a rose…”

In her latest cycle of sculptures, Marta Branicka integrates the features of the natural world with those constructed by human hand. The dichotomy of two universal elements directs us towards the meaning of the reality, realm, fiction, illusion and mimicry. The title: “Rose is a rose…” is quoted after Gertruda Stein, who called for the kind of interpretation in which things are named as such, unburdened with additional senses or distortion of their images. The hybrid nature of Marta Branicka’s objects is supposed to give insight into the persistency of the initial shape and the meaning, thus contained in it. Each sculpture draws from a photographical image of a certain fragment of nature. Therefore, although the forms, taken from reality, have different origins, they remain equivalent: far from building any hierarchies or opposing one another. They all follow the same system of transition – whether they are plants, bodies and objects. Transition introduces alteration, but at the same time protects the initial shape.

The iconographic realm referred to by the artist constitutes a set of biological and industrial signs. As a whole it points to the surrounding landscape, human environment in which bodies, constructs and solids grow one into another. Nature has absorbed industrial objects, thus constructing an integral image, visible environment, in which the components create interwoven  tissue of appearances and meanings.    

Marta Branicka graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts. She defended her diploma with distinction at the studio of Prof Stanisław Radwański. Since 1993 she has been working at the Faculty of Architecture and Design of the Gdańsk AoFA. Since 2002 she has been an Assistant Professor. Her works have been displayed at numerous exhibitions and the artist has participated in various plein-airs both in Poland and abroad including Germany, Canada, Lebanon and Mexico, to name just a few.

Marta Branicka’s display belongs to the larger “Logos – Bios” cycle that invites the artists who focus on analysing and confronting the phenomena happening at the borderline between culture and nature, namely in the domain of chaos represented by biology and the domain of logos identified with an order, human interference or even symbolic oppression.