Joanna Piotrowska: Implicit Lives

Madragoa is delighted to present  Implicit Lives, the third solo exhibition of Joanna Piotrowska (b. 1985, Warsaw) at the gallery. 

In the exhibition Implicit Lives, an intimate dimension is achieved with elements of domestic furniture, triggering a journey through time. Black-and-white photographs depicting men and (more often) women, caught in mutual, enigmatic, and suspended gestures, analogous to the Frowst series (2013–14), are here embedded in a domestic landscape. 

The photographs, subjects, materials, and surfaces used by Joanna Piotrowska in the exhibition reconstruct a personal, evocative rather than objective, universe. It feels familiar and stimulates observers to project themselves into it. Everyone can recognize in it an echo of their own lived experience and the nostalgia that the past can evoke. At the same time, the photographs and the display state that it is just a reconstruction—an illusion of truth—the checkmate of any attempt to reconstitute the past, in the present time, in an unambiguous way. Recollection can only proceed by fragments, epiphanies, surfaces, by isolating details or gestures, mimicking the mechanism of memory or dreaming—moreover evoked by the closed eyes, the lying position, of the abandoned limbs of some of the portrayed figures.

Please visit here for the full text by Sara de Chiara.