Events/Openings

November 2, 2013 to January 11, 2014
Opening on November 1, 2013, 6 to 9 PM

ŻAK | BRANICKA is delighted to present the first solo exhibition of the artist Natalia Stachon entitled The Problem of the Calm. The young artist investigates the relationships of space and matter, sensory impressions and experience, form and surface in her works. In the process, the site of art morphs into a stage, habitual conceptions of image are overruled or reinterpreted.

“Places find me. And they change me. It is always a journey with an unknown outcome.”

The eponymous work is an installation conceived especially for ŻAK | BRANICKA that completely fills the gallery space. Lines of stainless steel cables stretch from one wall to another, with different formations of glass and stainless steel elements hanging from their ends, as if to be strung on a pearl necklace. The shape and material are reminiscent of high-voltage power lines; defunctionalized as weights they generate a new sort of tension. Correspondingly, sculptures distributed on the floor enter. They are also clear structures, ordered, yet at the same time they are in contradiction with the previous ones. Stachon’s work depends on these kinds of contradictions, from a critical view of inherent meanings that change with the slightest shift and can create new ones. In the process the individual works engage with one another, thereby never appearing autarchic and closed, but rather becoming part of an open and alterable spatial scene.

Large format pencil drawings form the second part of the exhibition. Stachon succeeds also here in reducing things to the essential. A maximum of dynamics prevails in these precisely executed drawings, which evolves through the contrasts between light and dark, compaction and emptiness, sharp and soft lines. The line of the pencil comes together in dialogue with the plastic structure in the space and pursues this on a two-dimensional plane. This connection shows the constant correspondence between Stachon’s works, which take place on different layers and therefore immediately incorporate the viewer.

“I have aversion to everything that is finished, completed, absolute and total. I don’t believe in the idea of a concluded, autarchic work of art. Because it’s just not that way in my life. For that reason I work in series and variants. Every work originates from a previous one. They refer to each other and are connected among themselves. For that reason I prefer modular systems. Conditions, actions. Everything that you can staple, bundle up, hang, and pile up. They generate first an alleged order, but in fact their differences are still contained: their deconstruction, transformation, destruction. My works reside exactly in between. In transition between becoming and vanishing. […]

I draw according to references. From pictures that I made myself or researched. I cut out, turn, mirror the motifs. I install white surfaces, release and draw lines. The finished template is than meticulously transferred onto paper. In a conventional sense, that’s actually what my sculptural task is. How the image, the form casts itself off of the paper. You look at odd architecture, in rooms, containers, waste land, vacancies in which new spaces unfold out of gray scale and places of memory flood the piece of paper.

In the exhibitions my paper works can function like initial sparks. Out of the intimate observation the viewer rotates again in the room and proceeds on his path through the exhibition and to think about the event further. And is maybe at first disoriented? But in these moments of loss and disorientation, where the subconsciously assumed, the acquired, are interrupted without forewarning, he asks himself possible questions: How does this all go together? Where am I? When he looks for questions and finds them in the quiet, he is right in the middle of it. The space, the viewer and my art are in dialogue. In this way the space becomes a living body in the perception. An alterable splendor.” (Natalia Stachon, October 2013)

Natalia Stachon was born in 1976 in Kattowitz, Poland, studied visual art and visual communication at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg (with Pia Stadtbäumer) and photography at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Zürich. Her works have been shown at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich, at the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, at Daimler Contemporary in Berlin, at X-Initiative in New York, at Galeria Leme in Sao Paulo, and at Loock Galerie in Berlin, among others. Her works are part of renowned collections, such as, for example, the Daimler Art Collection in Berlin/Stuttgart, the Goetz Collection in Munich, the Foundation for Constructive, Concrete and Conceptual Art in Zürich, the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn, and the Menil Collection in Houston. Stachon lives and works in Berlin. A catalogue in the English language will be published.