Agnieszka Brzeżańska: This all occurs quickly, with ease, grace and joy

Marlborough Contemporary is pleased to announce ‘This all occurs quickly,
with ease, grace and joy’, an exhibition of new works by leading Polish artist
Agnieszka Brzeżańska. This will be the gallery’s second solo exhibition with
the artist and will include ten new paintings, all of which will display her
continued interest in unseen and unknowable forces in nature, as well as a
Taiko drum that the artist has commissioned for the exhibition. ‘This all occurs
quickly…’ follows the success of Brzeżańska’s 2015 exhibition at Wroclaw
Contemporary Museum.
Known primarily as a painter, Brzeżańska works in many mediums, including
video, photography and ceramics. For ‘This all occurs quickly, with ease,
grace and joy’ she worked with a master drum-maker to construct a Taiko
drum, which she subsequently learned to play and with which she has also
traveled through Poland by boat. In Japanese folklore, Taiko drums have
mythological origins. Through history, they have served in military action, as
theatrical accompaniment and performance and, in particular, for religious and
spiritual purposes. Brzeżańska’s drum summons energies and vibrations, to
investigate the physical activation of space within the paintings themselves.
Such resonances can be also found in the painted works, which pick up on
the visual vibrations and energies that emerge from form and colour.
The paintings in this exhibition represent something of a departure for the
artist, incorporating at once abstraction, forms in nature and elements of
language. Brzeżańska has researched widely in the fields of physics,
spirituality and esotericism. These works explore the possibility of a holistic
relationship between nature and art, between the experience of the work and
its creation, and an absolute continuity between the body and its relationship
to the world around it.
Exploring language and nature, the text formations in the paintings might be
understood as ‘sigils’, or formally constructed symbols that generate
particular energies or ‘spells’. Of necessity they are private lines of
communication, or signatures, that work as personal narratives for the artist
while at the same time generating their own formal, compositional logic.

About Agnieszka Brzeżańska
Agnieszka Brzeżańska works in painting, ceramics, video and photography.
Her practice is marked by a performative quality to making. It constantly
cross-references bodies of knowledge from science to philosophy, desire to
spirituality. The work brings together a complex array of influences, which are
rarely explicit and allow the work to open itself to heterogeneous components.
Brzeżańska was born in 1972 in Gdansk, Poland. She lives and works in
Warsaw and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Wroclaw Contemporary
Museum, 2015, Nomas Foundation, Rome, 2012, Kunsthaus Baselland and
DAAD Galerie, Berlin in 2010. Her monograph, L’artiste, le modèle et la
peinture was published in 2010 by Sternberg Press.