HOW THE RULER IS MADE

Instead of speaking directly about her works, Agnieszka Grodzińska prefers to leave clues, fragments of forms or thoughts from which a story can be pieced together. The term ‘deformity’ (polish: odkształt), which she often uses, can be read as a negative trace on the surfaces of prints and sculptural pieces. The artist works with a found image, just as she uses the term ‘found footage’ from cinema. Grodzińska selects photographic images from various sources, collects excerpts from texts, and enlarges the images with a photocopier, duplicates them, and creates scaled images with a clear grid. The central element of the exhibition is the installation How the Ruler Is Made, which occupies the gallery and transforms its architecture while hiding smaller graphic works and porous sculptures from recent years.

Works such as Quiet Quitting, Full Time Sunday, Nonsense & Inconsistency are soft objects made of denim, nylon, string and metal tubes. Semi-transparent layers of fabric, contrasted with accents in red, navy blue and black, interact with the paintings, creating cascading, geometrical structures and screens. Other works have perforations with geometric or text-like shapes. On the surface of some paintings are forms resembling woven networks of veins or webs, which establish their own structure.

Only when we get closer can we look inside the artist’s works and recognize the patterns that have been “imprinted” on them, with the help of overlapping stencils. We can also notice blurred outlines – traces of tools with intriguing shapes that bring to mind phantoms of erotic gadgets. It seems that the exhibition is a pretext for arranging all the elements in order of similarity, creating one spatial composition. The works are repetitive, but also disciplined: their rhythm in space is emphasized by axes and interwoven patterns.

In Grodzińska’s work, one can find references to, e.g,. illustrations from socialist school textbooks or propaganda books about birth and upbringing that were published in Eastern and Central Europe. One of the artist’s references is Modern Man in the Makingby Otto Neurath, a sociologist-economist and pioneer of pictograms, which are still in common use today. When it was published in 1939, and for the following decades, it was deeply believed that everything could be designed. The schematically visualized figures are a kind of legend superimposed on the world map, which goes hand in hand with the Western tendency towards the standardization of society.

Heads and masks are a frequent motif in the exhibition, with different variants appearing in the form of prints and patterns in works made of industrial rubber. The artist knows the properties of this material intimately and exploits its plasticity and rawness. She knows how it ‘behaves’. The basis for the paintings is denim, which was once used forwork and military clothing and whose texture is as visible as the patterns used by the artist. They are applied with acrylic and fabric paints on a thick material, often in red, navy blue, white, black and gray tones.

Grodzińska describes herself as a “collector of reproductions,” which can be understood as obsessively collecting existing images and their secondary versions. One of the leitmotifs that appear in many of the artist’s sculptures and assemblages are patterns of multiplied pictograms that schematically show a figure in action forging shapes, columns, houses, and children. Reproduction, the term for duplication, acquires a biopolitical dimension. Another pattern is the outline of a house, a refuge, which just like the normative concept of  family, no longer seems accessible to everyone, and instead becomes a privilege.

The artist draws attention to the problem of interpreting half-truths that are considered obvious and that are hidden behind commonly used ideas. With her own artistic language she also refers to personal observations: the repetition and rhythm of the placement of works in space can be interpreted as disciplined, and a constant attempt to control, improve, and create order, even where this is not necessary. Perhaps the futility of monitoring an individual, the pressure of belonging to a group, and the difficulty of functioning in a community, has finally become visible here. While the old order excludes and takes away, the new, potentially better order, has yet to come. Or maybe it is already occurring and is repeating all the same mistakes.

Text: Romuald Demidenko

photo: @prześwit studio