Natalia Bażowska Lair

25.04 – 21.06.2015 Natalia Bażowska Lair

Zachęta Project Room

curators: Magda Kardasz
cooperation: Karolina Bielawska

In her artistic credo Natalia Bażowska declares her fascination for life in all its forms, for both its psychological aspects and the physiology of the body, and for drawing inspiration also from the world around her. The exhibition that she has prepared for the Zachęta Project Room confirms these theses.

This young artist first drew the attention of a wider public as a result of her video-performance Luna in 2014. The film presents the relation between a woman and a wild she-wolf, and their attempts to find zones of understanding. We see the successive phases of this unusual dialogue – from observation at a distance conditioned by a self-preservation instinct right through to an inter-species understanding motivated by a universal need for proximity. The author says that she planned to shoot a film about wolves and that the proximity emerged of its own accord.

This formally beautiful work was made in a forest – in an experimental nature centre near to Poznań (in cooperation with wolf specialists), but the performance itself seems to reverse the situation often viewed in the case of artists working with animals of the transposition of wild creatures into locations of art. Bażowska strives to dive deeply into the natural environment, to feel it, to explore it through touch (as in another film shown at the exhibition, Intimacy); what she is interested in is an empathetic recognition of the world of nature, and not of its subjugation or the instrumental making use of its elements in the creation of a work.

At the exhibition, Luna is situated in the vicinity of a spatial-sound installation. The viewer is invited to enter a room filled with overlayered sounds of the howling of wolves, and to feel the softness and scents of forest undergrowth. The turning off of the scent of sight in this dark space deepens the impression of a full immersion into the world created by Bażowska.

On the ground floor of the gallery are to be found the lairs that give the exhibition its title. For some time, the artist has been creating fleece sculptures – built out of organic elements found in the wood and various sorts of sculptural connecting devices. In the Zachęta Project Room you can see sculptures from that cycle that remind us of wild animals. Lair is a development of the idea of fleece sculptures that attains the status of a spatial installation.

Natalia Bażowska is also a painter. She above all creates small scale paintings which emerge from the observations of people and nature, transformed through the filter of her own imagination. Each canvas in this way becomes a metaphorical story, a record of a state of consciousness. A characteristic of the creativity of Natalia Bażowska is the development of her favoured themes through successive works and through a series of different techniques. The exhibition Lair gives further proof of this truth.

Natalia Bażowska (born 1980) – graduated from the Silesian Medical University (2005) and the Academy of the Fine Arts in Katowice (2012). In 2010, she defended her PhD, An Assessment of the visual transmission of emotions evoked in people suffering from depression at the Department and Clinic of Psychiatry at the Silesian Medical University. In 2013, she was nominated for the „Polityka” magazine Passport award.

Related media
  • mediateka / audio
  • Grafika obiektu: Zachęta. March, April, May 2015
    mediateka / folders / Texts
    Zachęta. March, April, May 2015
    Magazine
  • Grafika obiektu: Zachęta. June, July, August 2015
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    Zachęta. June, July, August 2015
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  • Grafika obiektu: Natalia Bażowska. Lair
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    Natalia Bażowska. Lair
    Folder accompanying the exhibition
  • Grafika obiektu: Natalia Bażowska. Lair
    mediateka / posters
    Natalia Bażowska. Lair
  • Grafika obiektu: Natalia Bażowska
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    Natalia Bażowska
    Lair

Information

Natalia Bażowska
Lair
25.04 – 21.06.2015

Zachęta Project Room
ul. Gałczyńskiego 3, 00-362 Warsaw
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Godziny otwarcia:
tuesday–Sunday 12–8 p.m.
free entry

sponsor of the Zachęta Project Room: Benq
sponsors of the opening ceremony: Freixenet, Chocolissimo
media patronge: Notes.na.6.tygodni, The Warsaw Voice, Stolica