Joanna Piotrowska: Wyrwa

Wyrwa is an exhibition of new works by Joanna Piotrowska that rove uneven terrains of memory, fractured and refracted, lucid and overgrown. These new series’, mounted in bespoke steel, aluminium and glass frameworks, comprise images made over the summer in the town where Piotrowska grew up; childhood drawings, folded and overturned; and close-cropped fragments from her father’s negatives tucked behind sunset-tinted glass. Drawings and paintings made by Piotrowska and her cousins as children form the bases of new collages incorporating polaroids, small prints, stickers, marbles and ornaments, two mounted within hand-blown glass frames made in collaboration with Jochen Holz. Glass reoccurs as a central material throughout the exhibition, no longer an invisible film. Here, it is protective, yet just as (if not more) fragile than that which it protects. Its presence is felt as guard, surround and lens. These unique assemblages – collections of souvenirs, recollections and tchotchkes, combining materials from the past with images made in the present day – have the air of a scrapbook. Just as Susan Stewart writes in On Longing of the condition of the souvenir as enfolding a simultaneous intimacy and distance; as something that ‘both mourns and celebrates the gap between object and context of origin’, the condition of Wyrwa is the presence of a gap where something once was. This gap is a site of nostalgia, but most of all it is characterised by longing. The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia. Black and white snapshots of Piotrowska’s hometown, mounted in stainless steel, hone in on instances where boundaries and infrastructures are breached by wear or overgrowth. Curbs, roads and turf muddle, trees and shrubs climb through wrought iron fences and gates, ground swallows concrete, flowers and weeds nudge through paving stones and manhole covers. These images speak to a sense of memory as a changeable landscape, lived in and so subject to the same wear and tear as the physical environments around us. Expanding on Piotrowska’s use of family archives, the works that line the perimeter of the second gallery space repeat the same image seven times around: a sunset filtered through a wild spray of tree branches. The image is taken from a photographic print taken by her father before her birth – one of the few possessions left behind after his passing. Piotrowska scanned the image and created a negative which was then enlarged and ultimately reframed. The series closes the distance between his eye and hers, his composition and hers, his memory and hers. The resulting image has the hazy, out-of-focus quality of a recollection once-removed. The seven sunsets are further filtered by sheets of coloured, hand-blown glass in a spectrum of dusk tones. Held at a distance from the wall with bespoke aluminium clasps – again, a gap is maintained – they cast soft light and texture over and around the image surface, so that a single moment is stretched across a cycle of phases, sundown suspended. Very special thanks to Sebastian Edge at North London Darkroom; Phil Brown at Other People’s Sculpture; Jonny Lyons; Jochen Holz; David Stearn. Joanna Piotrowska (b. 1985, Warsaw, Poland. Lives and works in London and Porto) uses photography, performance, installation and assemblage to construct dream-like, fragmented choreographies of bodies and landscapes. In her compositions, often staged, then cropped, collaged and pierced, gestures and objects are freighted with implications of intimacy and claustrophobia; tenderness and violence – whether derived from personal histories and distant memories or from external sources such as psychotherapeutic methodologies and self-defence manuals. Solo exhibitions include A moment of darkness at noon , The Common Guild, Glasgow, as part of Glasgow International (2026); unseeing eyes, restless bodies , ICA Philadelphia, USA (2024); Entre nous , LE BAL, Paris, France (2023); Sub Rosa , with Formafantasma, Phillida Reid, London (2022); Sleeping Throat, Bitter Thirst , Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany (2022); FROWST , Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Poland (2020); Stable Vices , Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; All Our False Devices , Tate Britain, London. Piotrowska’s work was included in The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale 2022. Publications include Entre Nou s (2023), Stable Vices (2021), Frantic (2017) and Frowst (2014, recipient of the Mack First Book Award). Piotrowska’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FRAC Champagne Ardenne, FRAC Bretagne, KADIST, France; Tate, London, Leeds City Art Gallery, Northern Gallery of Art, Sunderland, National Photography Collection, Bradford, Arts Council Collection, UK; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands; EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland; Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Japan; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Poland. Read more Toggle Mixed media Photography