Genealogia / Genealogy

Naturally, I think about my ancestors, since I am so close to their shadows, since somehow I am them.

Deutsches Requiem, Jorge Luis Borges from the volume Aleph

GENEALOGY

Genealogy spins tales about relations and about memory, about assembling complicated constructions from fragments: matching, chafing and the hard art of keeping balance.

Patuszyńska is an instigator. She freely plays with conventions and forms. She is interested in deconstruction of forms and deconstruction of meanings. In the objects she creates there appear familiar elements which are deprived of their functions, juxtaposed in new configurations and made to performs new roles. Her works are collages of elements borrowed from everyday life and experiences gathered while working in new places and cultures processed by the artist - because Patuszyńska is a nomad-artist.

This time the artist decided to look closely at the history of her family, the way of transferring and inheriting grudges and resentments, family narrations, proportions of facts and fabrications, misrepresentations and colourations. The created works do not reproduce this history literally; it couldn’t have been recreated because majority of its characters died long ago. Even if they lived, probably they would not reach an agreement about what the history should really look like. Patuszyńska does not search for historical truth, she looks for such elements of this puzzle that will allow her to tell her personal story – about inheritance, about memory and about relationships.

In the project the artist interlaces many problems she has addressed before: the boundary between uniqueness and mass scale, study of identity of places and transition of values, and finally her fascination with the process of casting and the material such as porcelain. She has long been fascinated by the experience of the moment of passage and crisis. Her project Bastards & Orphans, realized in 2013-14, spoke about what remained in the material and intellectual sphere after factories of china closed; it asked about the place of art, design, intellectual property in life and in society in an encounter with the ‘external’ world, about their value, significance and future.

Patuszyńska makes her everyday statements through ‘negative spaces’ which are porcelain casts of the plaster forms she creates. In the Genealogy project the history of her family is used as a filter through which the artist may take a fresh look at her own creative process in its entirety.

Monika Patuszyńska graduated from the Faculty of Ceramics and Glass at the Academy of Fine Art in Wrocław in 1999. She was the last designer of the Factory of Porcelite Tableware ‘Pruszków’ and the last president of the International Ceramics Symposium ‘Porcelain Another Way’. Since 2009 she has been a member of the International Ceramics Academy (AIC/IAC) with its seat in Geneva. In the years 2014-2016 she was Art Director of the Institute of Design in Kielce.

Addicted to porcelain, Patuszyńska has invented an original method of casting from plaster forms. She is fascinated with transition and everything connected with the passage of time.

Her works can be found in museum collections all over the world, inter alia at the Museum of Modern Ceramic Art in Gifu in Japan, Jingdezhen Ceramics Museum in China, Mungyeong Ceramics Museum in Korea, Danmarks Keramikmuseum in Denmark or Musée de la Céramique in Vallauris, France; they were presented in over 100 exhibitions, including 10 solo shows.

Totalizator Sportowy is a partner of the jubilee year of the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko.