Feet, 4 Walls & Head | Galeria Stereo

Bureau is pleased to announce our exhibition opening the fall season: Feet, 4 Walls & Head, a collaboration with Galeria Stereo from Warsaw Poland. This two-person exhibition features Gizela Mickiewicz and Roman Stańczak, sculptors from two different generations in Warsaw, both working with everyday objects and materials. Their works converge at points of material transformation. Mickiewicz focuses on the metaphysical potential of sculpture while Stańczak’s work is exceptionally physical, bending objects to his intense spiritual will.

Imagine a simple drawing of a human body and a space at one time. Feet, four walls and head. A sculpture. It would also be a representation of an inner space understood as a place of intellectual and emotional events, where walking and thinking mean basically the same – a passage from one thought to another, through the chaos.

Gizela Mickiewicz and Roman Stańczak both rework these kind of inner walks and shape them into sculptural forms. These forms derive from everyday experiences and are built of common materials and objects such as glass, sand, cement, steel, mirror, an iron, a bathtub, a cupboard. While the material world is the matter, the works refer to the body and the self and space. “My sculptures speak about life, however, not among objects but among spirits”, says Stańczak. His works are usually made out of distorted objects, and his practice is based on obsessive repetition of a sculpting gesture, extended until the ordinary object absorbs the energy dedicated to it and is transformed. Mickiewicz recently realized a series of sculptural works that illustrate complex mental states. Shapes, textures and weight of matter, as well as relations between objects create messages reflecting the emotional tensions and subtleties specific to internal states. Therefore a state not easily expressed in words finds its material representation, physically embodied.

Courtesy of the artists and Bureau, New York

Photos by Jason Mandella