Dimensions: 135 x 125 x 19 cm
Biography
Jan Smaga is a photographer, documentarian of exhibitions, author of conceptual photographic works. He has repeatedly worked in duo with Aneta Grzeszykowska, creating labor-intensive photographic installations
focusing on the relationship between architecture, private space and the human body.
Hanna Rechowicz, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk. She is a painter, sculptor, interior decorator, theater set designer and designer of artistic textiles. Together with her husband, Gabriel Rechowicz, she has co-authored many artistic decorations in architecture.
The Circle is a collection of more than a hundred photographic objects made jointly by Hanna Rechowicz and Jan Smaga. It recalls the history of the house on Lekarska Street in Warsaw, where the artist still lives today. The house - a work in process - shaped from the early 1950s by the artist couple Gabriel and Hanna Rechowicz, and nurtured and developed by his wife after Rechowicz's death. A place with a rich past - for several decades a meeting center of Warsaw's artistic community: architects, visual artists and filmmakers. It is also a space for painterly and sculptural interventions in the architectural substance and a gradual accumulation of various materials, objects combined by the Rechowiczs into poetic assemblages.
Jan Smaga aims to maintain the integrity of this process. The artist, known as the author of works with the character of "total documentation"-a maximally adequate and objective presentation of the documented object-provides a multidimensional insight into this space through photographs enclosed in the perfect shape of a tondo. He is not interested in an illusory and "flat" shot in the nature of a random frame. He advocates a model of the photographic image that takes into account the depth associated with the information encoded in it. This way of thinking about the image also motivated his project for a comprehensive documentation of the Rechowicz house.
Respecting the specificity of the place - the fluidity of the processes taking place in it, the tendency to differentiate forms and spatial expansion - Jan Smaga asked Hanna Rechowicz to complement the photographic images he created with a frame. The resulting forms bring the busy and unclosed substance of the house out of the depths of the photographic representations to the outside. The way the frames are shaped and the materials used (copper sheet, steel, lead, aluminum or leather), subjected to various color and texture modifications, correspond with the elements visible in the photographs. Frames develop visual narratives, enhance the colors of the photographs, and enter into resonance with the motifs fixed on them. The components - frame and image - become complementary and equivalent to each other. The frame lends reality to the photographic representations, while neutralizing its isolating function. And the placement of these objects in the gallery opens the possibility of their further expansion - the transfer of the artistic process into a multitude of other visual and spatial contexts. Exposed in the halls of Zachęta, they become representatives of an inaccessible place, impossible to see from the outside and in a single act of looking.
