Through Veins and Shadows

23/04/2026 - 30/05/2026

Konrad Krzyżanowski | Joanna Wierzbicka

Entering the liminal space of “Through Veins and Shadows,” the viewer is immediately welcomed into a phenomenological proscenium. It unfolds between light and shadow, fullness and emptiness, presence and absence. This threshold extends across the totality of time, marked by its inexorable flow.

Here, the body becomes an instrument of perception. Matter reveals itself as an active agent of reality, remaining in constant dialogue with lived experience; between reminiscences, urgencies of the present, and projections or intimations of the future.

The works are distributed throughout the space as traces of a collective organism. At times, they appear blurred or overlapping; at others, reduced to essential forms. They suggest a deep respiratory rhythm and a silent flow that moves through hologram-like bodies, rarefied landscapes, silhouettes, branching structures, light fabrics, and hard, slippery surfaces. Within this interplay of bodily memory and antithetical materials, a perceptual ecosystem emerges, where touch, sight, and imagination come together into a dense sensory experience.

“Through Veins and Shadows” thus presents itself as a space where the visible and the imperceptible converge. Here, the memory of the body and that of matter manifest through oxymoronic morphologies, complex stratifications, and subtle tensions.

The artistic practices of Konrad Krzyżanowski and Joanna Wierzbicka can be understood as two complementary approaches to materiality and temporality. Both explore the fluidity of boundaries, focusing on how relations between inside and outside, human and non-human, and sedimented temporalities and present urgencies remain unstable and in flux. Through painting and sculpture, respectively, they give form to works that reveal the sensitive, reactive, and deeply porous nature of experience.

On the one hand, Konrad Krzyżanowski develops his research primarily through painting. His palette ranges from steel-like tones, characteristic of greys, to warmer, creamier hues, subtly permeated by natural light. This creates a dichotomous effect, oscillating between the incisive imprint of the Anthropocene and the echo of distant times. At the same time, he explores photography and video, producing evocative images that both construct and deconstruct multiple memories. His works invite the viewer to confront the unstable and elusive nature of reminiscence. They emerge as atemporal landscapes in which recycled memories, reworked recollections, and processes of editing and decay intertwine with actors, gestures, postures, and expanded, almost cinematic environments. A subtle tension arises—between nostalgia and unease, familiarity and estrangement. Through the use of personal archives and found imagery, the artist constructs visual narratives suspended between certainty and ambiguity. In doing so, he reflects on the fragility, mutability, and multiplicity of perception, as well as on the potential of the iconographic repertoire.

In this sense, his work may be associated with the work of the writer and innovator William S. Burroughs, known for his raw, often disturbing portrayal of society and for his impact on experimental narrative. This is particularly evident in the cut-up technique, understood here as a metaphorical device capable of fragmenting and recomposing visual storytelling. As in Burroughs’ writing, autobiographical elements, constructed narratives, and found images overlap and contaminate one another in Krzyżanowski’s practice. Together, they form a discontinuous and stratified visual grammar, marked by a sensibility akin to Dada.

At the same time, the artist expands this framework by incorporating a collective and cultural dimension, filtered through the sensibility and aesthetic imagination of his generation. He also addresses themes related to queerness, male vulnerability, and the questioning of heteronormative codes. These threads are permeated by a diffuse sensuality, giving rise to a narrative that is also autobiographical, reflecting on identity, self-affirmation, and social interaction.

His paintings can thus be understood as ontological devices: spaces where the visible and the unknown, the real and the phantasmal, coexist and engage with one another. In this context, the stability of perception and memory is called into question, inviting us to consider memory as a living, dynamic process, constantly rewritten through personal experience.

On the other hand, Joanna Wierzbicka emphasises the materiality of the body and the active nature of matter. Her practice, which primarily includes sculpture, but also photography and installation, privileges fabrics, worn garments, and organic materials as tools for investigating vital processes and embodied memory. Her sculptures shift between softness and hardness, lightness and density. They take on organic, unsettling forms that resemble intestines or vein-like structures and relate to an aesthetic associated with body horror. This genre, often associated with physical deformation, is used here as a conceptual framework to question how human and non-human bodies emerge together, how boundaries between interior and exterior dissolve, and how material structures remain permeable.

Through processes of collection, transformation, and reactivation, matter becomes a carrier of memory, contamination, and metamorphosis. It generates forms that are at once narrative and organic.

In this context, the words of the British writer Mary Shelley, from her novel “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” (1818), seem to resonate: “After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” In Wierzbicka’s work, matter similarly becomes a vehicle of inevitable transformation. Its vulnerability reflects emotional intensity and existential tension, suggesting how the body and vital impulse can continuously stimulate thought and a vivid creative imagination.

Her works embody a practice in which body and matter are not passive objects, but active agents, capable of transformation and of maintaining an ongoing dialogue with the viewer. In this sense, they recall certain reflections of Heideggerian phenomenology, in which the body is understood as being-in-the-world.

Recent projects such as “Fictional Characters,” “Subterfuge,” and “Earthworm Fantasies” further develop these concerns. They introduce speculative figures and hybrid organisms that reflect on survival, adaptation, empathy, and coexistence. The use of imaginary appendages, digestive systems, and processes of decomposition functions as a conceptual device for examining the relationship between body, ecology, and temporality. The installations take the form of porous ecosystems where matter remembers, reacts, and continuously transforms. Form emerges here through the interaction of biological, material, and symbolic processes.

In “Through Veins and Shadows,” Wierzbicka’s most recent research materializes in floor-based metal sculptures. These works evoke skeletal structures and embryonic organisms, suspended between substrate and amorphous creature. The becoming of matter and form, always in transformation, recalls the idea of continuous flux and mutation present in certain contemporary theories. Her sculptures, like Krzyżanowski’s visionary and spectral paintings, can be understood as bodies in transformation. They are captured in a moment of metamorphosis, suspended between identity and alterity, intimacy and exposure, memory and embodied perception.

Placed in dialogue, the practices of these two young Polish artists generate a field of mutual contamination, offering the viewer a space in which to project themselves and, in turn, to re-encounter themselves. If Krzyżanowski moves backwards, deconstructing memory through images, Wierzbicka renders it visible as an embodied process, inscribed within matter itself. Together, though working in opposite directions, both artists reflect on the permeability of boundaries. They reveal how time and inheritance manifest simultaneously as subjective and collective, aesthetic and corporeal processes.

Here and now, body and memory flow together, moving between what appears and what remains in shadow, and between what takes form and what still trembles in uncertainty. This resonates with Henri Bergson’s concept of durée: an inner, continuous, and indivisible duration, qualitatively heterogeneous and irreducible to the linear measurement of scientific time, leaving its trace upon things. “Through Veins and Shadows” thus unfolds as both a theoretical and perceptual device—a proscenium in which all elements intertwine in an almost capillary manner, revealing the fluid, unstable, tireless, and deeply relational nature of existence.

curator: Domenico de Chirico