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The Gallery presents a new body of work by artist Kasia Fudakowski with her first solo exhibition in a public gallery. Fudakowski’s small handcrafted sculptures explore classical themes of space, volume and illusion and combine art historical references with a personal iconography. She focuses on the nature of sculpture and the particular qualities and associations of the materials she uses – including silk and gold, as well as terracotta, pasta and nutshells.
While the depiction of the male form and sexual symbols were frequently deployed in Fudakowski’s earlier work, a selection of these newer works focus on the architectural spaces used to frame these figures. Minimal architectural forms such as windows (with views), grids and columns are established as recurrent motifs and Fudakowski traces out a folding out of planes and surfaces from the drawings to the three dimensional works. Shifting between illusory perspective and embellished surfaces, the new sculptures become sculptural and fetish objects, using established pictorial devices to reveal a form of dormant eroticism in the materials themselves.
In her precise compositions the artist makes use of a wide variety of materials and craft techniques, from fabric weaving to metalworking. Linen is often present as an explicit material component rather than as support for sculpture, complicating the function of the trompe l’oeil effects employed by Fudakowski. As much as these mediums are chosen for their material characteristics, Fudakowski is also interested in making evident the labour required to manipulate them. The intricate works become an index of the time invested in their making, the result of mental and meditative activity, rather than an emphasis on physical exertion or virtuosic ability.
Fudakowski has spoken of living at the end of time and the associated questions this raises of ‘over production’ and entropy frame her key concerns of how value and meaning can be ascribed today. Fudakowski’s work is intimate and revels in the pleasure of looking, consistently returning to a sense of the profane, which in these new works is somehow domesticated and tempered with gentle humour.