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Exhibitions
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The Navel of the Dream

11.04.2024 - 09.05.2024


The Navel of the Dream / 11.04.2024 - 09.05.2024

On 12 April, the City Gallery launches a group exhibition titled “The Navel of the Dream”, showcasing art which narratively and formally turns towards the surrealist, symbolic and romantic. In the paintings, textiles, ceramic sculptures and objects displayed at the exhibition, Polish artists take different approaches to exploring the areas of magic, esotericism, spiritualism, fairy tales, oneirism, psychedelia, horror and mythology.

Young artists’ artworks, phantasmagorical and dreamy in their aura, are always rooted in the real. Touching upon the chimerical and the strange, the artists filter their own visions through their view on the contemporary world and its most burning issues. Above all, however, they creatively use the dreamy, fairy-tale-like and sometimes disturbing aesthetics to construct autobiographical, often very intimate and strongly emotive stories in paintings, sculptures and objects. They methodically bring together the outer and the inner world, thus juxtaposing the material reality with that which escapes materialisation.

Just like a dream, the art presented at the exhibition seamlessly incorporates the explicit and the implicit, the conscious and the unconscious, and the real with the imagined. It is like a rift, through which the artists can break free from the phantasm of contemporaneity without violating its defining vagueness and ambivalence. In this way, their work becomes akin to the eponymous Freudian navel of the dream – blocking all law of understanding, a mysterious, exitless point of dissolved boundaries where truth takes on the structure of fiction.

The creative output by the artists participating in the exhibition is conceptually inscribed in issues related to challenging simple, dualistic divisions. Hence, when looking at this art, the Freudian category of the uncanny/unhomely (unheimlich) imposes itself almost spontaneously. The term developed from its antonym (“canny/homely” – heimlich) and remains inextricably linked to it. This linguistic usus encapsulates the entire mystery of the uncanny, emphasising that in fact it is nothing new or alien to us – it has long been known to our psychic life but was banished from it through a process of repression. Moving fluidly between universes devoid of clear dividing lines and constantly balancing on the boundary between the real and the imaginary, the conscious and the unconscious, the overt and the covert, the artists patiently trace the manifestations of the uncanny and transpose them into their own art.

The exhibition at the City Gallery in Wrocław is thus an attempt to approach the eponymous navel of the dream, where the real begins its intricate transformation process and ultimately manifests itself in elements of the uncanny.

The exhibition is on view until 9 May 2024.

Curator: Katarzyna Zahorska

Engaged artists: Jędrzej Bieńko, Martyna Borowiecka, Krzysztof Gil, Natalia Kopytko, Paweł Olszczyński, Patrycja Piętka, Jan Porczyński, Agata Słowak, Justyna Smoleń, Sasza Wiktor, Milan Zientara.

Krzysztof Gil, I Wish This Could Be Your Color, oil on canvas 137 × 100 cm, 2024, courtesy of the artist and Monopol Gallery
Sasza Wiktor, Sebastian’s Holiday, ceramics, 16 × 10 × 29 cm, 2023, private collection
Martyna Borowiecka, Photosensitivity, 50 × 50 cm, oil on canvas, 2022
Natalia Kopytko, Fiery from Crowns cycle, ceramic sculpture, 35 × 35 × 55 cm, 2022
Paweł Olszczyński, A Vase with Nixes, glazed ceramics, 26 × 21 × 16 cm, 2024
Justyna Smoleń, Fall in love, porcelain, ceramics, collage, 45 × 29 × 20 cm, 2022, photo Rafał Sosin
Milan Zientara, Blind Strategies of Survival, oil on canvas, 140 × 120 cm, 2024
Agata Słowak, Different Figures in the Same Character (Filip’s), oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm, 2023, from the private collection of Sylwia and Piotr Krupów, photo Marek Gardulski
Jędrzej Bieńko, No title, acrylic on linen canvas, 130 × 160 × 5 cm, 2024, courtesy of the artist and Pola Magnetyczne Gallery
Jan Porczynski, No title, gouache on paper, 21 × 13,8 cm, 2024
Patrycja Piętka Evocation, oil on canvas, 100 × 130 cm, 2024, photo Katarzyna Mierzwińska, Art Agenda Nova archives, Cracow

Galeria Miejska we Wrocławiu
ul. Kiełbaśnicza 28
50-109 Wrocław

(71) 344 67 20
biuro@galeriamiejska.pl

Kule - projekt Lech Twardowski, wykonanie Wiesław Waszkiewicz
Logotyp - Marta Płonka