Patrycja Orzechowska

The artistic practice of Patrycja Orzechowska is based around the materiality of things, the mysterious life of objects and social choreography. In her recent projects, she focuses on object-oriented ontology, archeology of the future and the relationship between people and objects. Such dependence is often—as the artist describes it—obsessive, loving or sentimental. At the same time, working with leftovers, ready-made objects and the human body, she casually practices physical and mental recycling.

The solo show Embracing the Dark features works from recent years, the common medium of which is ceramics, used as a prosthesis on the collection of ready-made objects. The exhibition presents complementary works in one installation space, which inspires countless interpretation possibilities, but at the same time allows individual pieces to exist autonomously.

The works are the result of the artist’s fascination with the material world and the life of things. She draws from the experience of the theater of objects, where particular emphasis is placed on the utilitarian and manipulative aspect of the human relationship with things. In a metaphorical way, Orzechowska transforms the meaning of seemingly primitive things, releasing their poetic, surreal and inevitable melancholy. The inner parts of thermoses become urns, no longer maintaining the temperature, but reflecting the viewer’s image in its cold mirror surface. Some of the materials used by the artist are her finds from the Polish countryside—they are things relating to everyday life, excavated from the ground and cellars: sharp and rusty objects such as hooks, pliers, old nails, chains or winches. Useless pokers acquire characteristic features of birds, skull trophy bases are replaced with ceramic substitutes, eggs have navels… Many of them are still unspoken.

In her practice, Patrycja Orzechowska currently focuses on magical objects endowed with the power to move and act, things and their affectivity, emanation, secret life, death, reincarnation and the archeology of the future; artifacts created with the participation of human and non-human beings in a universe of violence, vibrating matter somewhere on the scale between a dead thing and a living presence.