10.02.–24.04.2011
Exhibition in the Great Hall

Marzena Nowak

Opening: February 09, 2011, 7 p.m.

Ephemeral and fragile, but at the same time full of urgency and presence, this is how the work of the young Polish artist Marzena Nowak is described. How does the artist manage to connect these contrasts in her videos, sculptures, and paintings? Everything originates with the body. But this body is not a thing or a tool, but rather a seismograph of the soul. Watching her videos, it seems as though the body is set in oscillations through a specific form of mental urgency. The artist chronicles these in small scenes of repeated gestures, thereby opening up a space of association for us that bespeaks pain, tenderness, and intimacy.

Die Psyche ist ausgedehnt (The Psyche is Expansive) was the title of one of the artist’s recent texts explaining her work. When we enter one of Ms. Nowak’s shows we find ourselves in this space of the psyche. Memories of childhood and youth, patterns, repetitions, spaces in between materialize as psychological distance in the actual artifacts set up in the space and are made tangible.

This parcours leads us through the boundaries of the body, inside, and back out again. “The body in my work is psyche,” says the artist – but the last secrets can be drawn from neither the body nor the psyche. The power of Marzena Nowak’s artwork lies much more in making the mental work of repetition visible and in the physical persistence of the search.

Marzena Nowak, born 1977 in Piaseczno, lives and works in Warsaw