4 ROOMS Vol.2 LETO Gallery, Warsaw, Poland
Install view, LETO Gallery, Photo credit; Bartosz Górka
Install view, LETO Gallery, Photo credit; Bartosz Górka
Densely painted oil paintings by Maria Kozak balance the representation of the body and the streak of gesture dissolving towards abstraction. It is a world where human figures emanate feelings. Fleshy impastos of paint applied with a spatula spill into quivering and vibrating patches of oily colors.
These are stories about the fleshy shades of intimacy, bright moods, and the warm color of passion. They intersect with stories about hazy bluish remoteness, the cold darkness of relationships, and a miasma of shadowy loneliness. Spaces of harmony and anguish of the spirit are equal heroes of this looping plot.
The Loveboat and Perfect Strangers are stories about the nature of relationships that constantly drift between waves of integration and autonomy. Turbulent abysses of emotions precede windless moments of calm. A constant procession of close-ups in which desire turns into intimacy. But also eternally unexplored layers of mutual strangeness, in which "two loneliness border each other, protecting and greeting each other."
The work Social Animals tells the story of societal clashes between the community and predatory individualism. The Seeker tries to find himself in hermitic seclusion, searching for the relationship between the external and spiritual worlds. However, the quest for answers never ends, like in The Mortal Coil, where we constantly go around a vicious circle, shedding successive layers of masks and no longer fitting skin that grows over us.
— Sebastian Gawlowski
Dissolving Margins Dreamsong, Minneapolis, MN
Dreamsong is pleased to announce Dissolving Margins, a two-person exhibition featuring sculpture by Julia Haft- Candell and recent paintings by Maria Kozak. The exhibition title references an Italian term central to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels ‘smarginatura,’ translated as ‘dissolving margins’ by Ann Goldstein, and described as “the sensation of moving a few fractions of a second into a person or a thing or a number of a syllable, violating its edges.”
Drawing inspiration from the occult and esoteric orders, Kozak began her recent paintings with digital sketches, intuitively manipulating two color fields until desirable forms emerge. The central subject of this body of work are the cyclical, irresolvable interactions that emerge from the classic dichotomies of the human condition, such as physical/ spiritual, control/surrender or stillness/movement. Kozak
is interested in the “The idea of eternal return, that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur an infinite number of times across infinite time or space.”
Like Kozak, Haft-Candell is materially and conceptually interested in liminal space and the subversive interaction
of dichotomies. Also beginning with intuitive gestures, Haft- Candell models clay objects into a growing lexicon of forms she has spent years developing. In 2017, the artist published the infinite, a glossary of terms and symbols that articulates the multiple meanings undergirding these forms and provides insight into their personal, social and psychological origins. The infinite often highlights the way in which opposed symbols are paradoxically connected, such as ‘The Torus’, which the artist describes as “The ring or donut shape, associated with female... While perhaps seen as oppositional to the Dash in the linear world, in the Infinite, the two must coexist.”
Dissolving Margins highlights conceptual and formal reverberations between Kozak and Haft-Candell’s distinct practices. In particular, both artists undermine hard binaries by imagining hybrid forms. Kozak, working in oil paint, and Haft-Candell in ceramic, upend the delineation of stable categories through embracing ambiguity and porous borders. In sensuous oil paintings and ceramic sculptures that that trace the body while gesturing towards abstraction, forms seep, bleed and interlock through the alchemy of touch.
— Rebecca Heidenberg