Patrycja Orzechowska

^{Photo by Andrzej Karmasz}

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Patrycja Orzechowska—visual artist, author of art books (KINDERTURNEN / MEDIUM / DEADLINE. Never Ending Story), specializes in photography, collage, ceramics, installation, collecting, graphic design and ready-mades but most likes to practice crop rotation; graduated from the Faculty of Painting and Graphics, majoring in graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Interdisciplinary PhD Studies at the Faculty of Mutimedia Communication of the University of Arts in Poznań. Her works were exhibited at dozens of one-man and group exhibitions. The founder of the JAMI Issue publishing company. Lives and works in Gdańsk.

The field of artist’s interest and practice is quite extensive, it includes the study of human condition and identity, psychology of seeing, cultural memory, cinematography, subjective experience of the past, the moment of suspension between the past and the future, micro-landscapes, inconspicuous views and banal details as essential elements of reconstructing the identity. She is interested in the choreography of the body and inscribing it into various structures or constructions, as a form which serves both: the vain attempt of restoring the proper order of things in our social and family life as well as searching for harmony in the urban tissue. That is why in her practice she often refers to a variety of performing arts, cooperating with modern dancers, gymnasts and actors, she creates artworks with the human figure as the main motif. The bodies subjected by her to an innocent training become structured compositions of disturbing shapes. A crucial aspect of her work is a turn towards what is subjective, which she does by undertaking themes of more extensive social context not depriving them of an intimate dimension at the same time. What seems to be essential is exploring the juxtaposition of that which is private with that which is public and researching various individual spaces with common iconosphere. She treats her work as a field of experiment and experience, therefore, apart from drawing inspiration from the study of psychology or sociology, she eagerly reaches for risky practices and methods such as constellations or astrology in order to use them to create an alternative theatrical or supposed image of reality, which is seen from a new point of view.

In her recent work she deals mainly with OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology) and relationship between people and objects (Objects in Withdrawal / Embracing the Dark / Retrogradation / Life after Life. Who do es make things different? / Medium). This relation often tends to be obsessive, loving and sentimental. As a collector of miserable things, of dubious beauty and usefulness, surrounded by still expanding collection of ‘garbage’ she sees herself as a person addicted to subjects. Simultaneously working on the remains, the ready-made objects, the human body she casually cultivates physical and mental recycling. By working on the archives and doing collages from old newspapers and books (Zeitgeist MMXXI / Thoughtforms / Monuments / Deadline. Never Ending Story / Kinderturnen / Love & Medicine. Anthology / Greetings from Eternity ), sculpting the body like clay (Gymnastic Studies / Sculptures just now! / Settings. Exercises / Homebody) building new forms and meaning of the collections of clustered items (title in progress (urns) / Ikebana / Retrogradation / Ashes to Ashes / The Bone Collector / Sun in the Twelfth House / Future Perfect / Skeletons / Wall) she still has to deal with the appealing materiality and hell of things.