KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Künstler*innen

Olaf Brzeski

Poland

Out of Love For a Woman, Steel, aluminium, oil paint, 450 x 290 x 350 cm, 2012

Olaf Brzeski’s artistic narrative could begin like this: ‘In the beginning was the subject’ – meaning a distinct, virtually modernist, authorial Self. The question whether such a construed, ostentatiously individualistic subject is not perhaps a reactionary figure is better left to those who like to judge art in terms of progress. Defying the logic of progress, Brzeski’s work is largely based on the gesture of returning. It is a return to certain traditional categories, often repressed from the conscious mind, a step back – towards instinct, desire and anxiety, towards the primitive, and eluding the rigours of social organisation. His returns to traditional sculptural categories are free from nostalgia for the “good old” order of art. If Brzeski returns to all that (to the unconscious and the primitive as well as to sculpture) it is because he believes that these areas hold untapped resources, unresolved issues and sources of self-knowledge that can still be drawn from.

Stach Szabłowski

STAY
15.09.2014 – 15.09.2015