Zachęta Project Room

curator: Magda Kardasz
cooperation: Julia Harasimowicz

In the exhibition Where Do Thoughts Come From? at the Zachęta Project Room, artist Zofia Gramz presents the summary of a year-long artistic/research project where she made drawings and subjected herself to self-analysis, seeking to identify the motifs that had inspired the specific works. The drawings were made spontaneously, without forethought, on an improvised basis, the artist then proceeding to try and identify their inspiration. The result of this process is an installation: each drawing is surrounded by photographs, objects, or films symbolising the alleged sources of inspiration as well as brief journal entries where the artist commented on the key events, conversations, books, and art works of 2016. The next stage of work was analysing the complete material and selecting works for exhibition. In this, the artist followed the principle of proportionality: drawings from a given thematic group were selected in a number corresponding with the frequency of the theme’s occurrence throughout the year. The show concludes with graphs reflecting the principal sources of inspiration. With a characteristic sense of humour, Zofia Gramz subjects the essence of the creative process, the action of the subconscious — highly subjective areas that elude simple classifications — to pseudo-scientific analysis.

Drawing remains Zofia Gramz’s favourite medium. She calls it ‘thinking in process’ or a ‘third domain of thinking — dreaming by doing’. Her previous exhibitions consisted of series of small-format drawings in black ink on paper. Each bore a title that offered a clue as to its meaning. Sensitive to the absurdities of contemporary life, the artist likes to sweep through the media noise for useful phrases, transforming stupid-sounding slogans into titles that reference various aspects of the world or problems, whether real or created by the media.

The show indeed seeks to answer the question of ‘Where do thoughts come from?’ This time Zofia Gramz has decided to reveal her deeper motivations, playing with the convention of scholarly investigation.

Zofia Gramz (b. 1981 in Szczecin). She graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in ateliers of Jan Kucz, Zofia Glazer-Rudzińska, Grzegorz Kowalski. She creates drawings, videos, animations. She lives and works in Warsaw.

Zofia Gramz, "What you give in, you get out", ink on paper, courtesy of
the artist