Wing Moved by Fingers

The Wing Moved by Fingers cycle is a series of nearly a hundred objects created between March and September 2020. Five of them are included in Collection II. They all share a common method of imaging, which consists of covering damaged PVC tiles with epoxy resin in which objects and fragments of illustrations cut from albums and books found in antique shops are embedded. Magdalena Łazarczyk’s works continue the tradition of collage, objets trouvés and the Dadaist and Surrealist model of combining distant things and motifs that do not form a logical iconographic narrative.

By juxtaposing images of humans, plants, animals, architecture and the outer space, Łazarczyk creates an à rebours story, one in which time loses its linearity and space is not conducive to orientation. Iconographic associations suggest that her own semantic system is in operation here: the tiles show, among others, clustered male figures reminiscent of antique sculptures juxtaposed with a gorilla’s maw (presumably a mask); the face of a woman from Raphael’s fresco The Triumph of Galatea with a shell superimposed over it; a bird, holding in its beak a piece of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century portrait of a woman in a ruff; a blouse and skirt levitating against a blue background; a shell motif combined with the brim of a plate; resin-infused leaves and a jasmine flower, and a piece of an illustration showing a figure in a long robe stepping on a dog. Łazarczyk forces the viewers to weave their own stories, to create their own maps of meaning. Interacting with her works suggests such ventures as analysing dreams, seeking for hidden meanings in free associations, identifying motifs with conscious or unconscious experiences. The creative process, in which imagination, intuition and chance are important, bears a resemblance to the reassembling of a disintegrated world.

Łazarczyk’s works affect the viewer through their distinctive aesthetics; their motifs are sophisticated, sometimes ambiguous and difficult to identify, at other times allowing excursions into the history of culture. The whole is characterised by an oneiric atmosphere of half-dream, half-reality; the hybrid forms encourage the onlooker to seek primary motifs on the one hand, and on the other, to try to understand the meaning they carry. Everything, however, seems to be suspended in the dreamlike imagination of the artist, who is breaking through the layers of culture in search of her own vision of the world around her.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz