House, Shelter / Disappearance | Sylwia Jakubowska-Szycik

The exhibition by Professor Sylwia Jakubowska-Szycik is presented as part of the Logos – Bios series, initiated at the Gdańsk City Gallery (GGM) in 2012, which has so far featured the work of nine artists. The project brings together sculptors whose practices explore and confront the intersection of culture and nature – between the realm of chaos associated with biology and the domain of logos, understood as order, human intervention, or even symbolic oppression.

In her sculptural objects and installations, Sylwia Jakubowska-Szycik restores and reassigns meaning to materials that form the fabric of everyday life A central theme in her work is the idea of the home—not merely as a shelter, but as a site where identity is shaped and articulated. Her works are typically composed of multiple elements, allowing them to be freely integrated into various exhibition spaces. Similar multi-part objects will be presented in her latest exhibition at the Gdańsk City Gallery.

In her most recent works, the artist situates her practice somewhere between materiality and a gesture of destruction. Within this “in-between,” she reveals a space that may be read as provisional and fragile, yet also necessary: a shelter. Pieces of furniture, books and notebooks, seemingly damaged or broken, continue to exist in altered form; their perforation is not merely an act of destruction or decoration, but also of concealment. What was meant to be recorded becomes obscured, and disappearance itself becomes a form of protection: the content is no longer accessible and cannot be captured, used, or judged.

As Jakubowska-Szycik herself explains: “(…) in this way, destruction becomes a kind of house-shelter: a place where memory takes the form of matter stripped of meaning and therefore safe. Here, disappearance is not a loss but a strategy of survival. The holes left by the drill evoke absence, yet at the same time they construct a new presence: a structure in which what is hidden continues to breathe beneath the surface. Thus, the works situate themselves precisely within the tension between revelation and obscuration, between preservation and erasure, within a space that functions”.

Grażyna Tomaszewska-Sobko