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On 4 August, Wojciech Ireneusz Sobczyk is showcasing his latest exhibition project run within the space of the City Gallery in Wrocław. The exhibition features installations produced in artistic techniques such as collage, ceramics, textiles, graphics, cut-outs and accompanied by audiovisual effects.
The title of the exhibition – Danse macabre – refers to the representation of the Dance of Death, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages and enjoyed great popularity in the Baroque. It was a reminder of the inevitability and impartiality of death – equally ruthless towards the peasantry and the nobility. With its moralising overtones, however, the depiction focused primarily on human mortal existence and the necessity to experience death morally. The allegory contains the prospect of absolute finality, as the dance – summoning representatives from all social strata, skeletons and vermin-ridden corpses – terrified with the very fact of dying with all its biological consequences.
Thus, the title of the exhibition is somewhat deceptive. Although Sobczyk strongly explores the theme of death, he examines it in reference to the notion of time and transformations taking place within it. In his latest exhibition the artist departs from the anthropocentric perspective. Instead, he frees death from the context of its individual and subjective experience and situates it in the broad, extra-human universe of biological, natural and cosmic processes – with all their constancy and cyclical nature.
Sobczyk constructs his narrative on the incessant rotation of matter in the Universe by referring to such cultural phenomena as Sarmatism and Polish folk art. Through them, the artist presents two different ways of thinking about death and passing. The artist uses the visual language of Sarmatian funeral rites, yet he sets it in a natural and cosmological context, somewhat separating this cultural phenomenon from its inherent aura of finality, vividly expressed in the Sarmatian focus on mortality. Sobczyk also refers to Polish folk art, which in a way situates death at the other extreme to Sarmatism. The folk ornamental motifs and ritual elements used by the artist convey a deeply rooted truth about changeability of things and the cyclical nature of events that govern the world.
In its overall tone, the show points to the integrity of the human and the superhuman. It also highlights the fact that human life (and death) has its continuity in the processes of the Universe.
The exhibition will be on view until 6 September 2023.
Curator: Katarzyna Zahorska
Exhibition Partner: LETO Gallery
