Agnieszka Lasota's works do not conform with the canons of modern design. Instead she places an emphasis primarily on material issues, focusing on memory, history and the affirmation of womanhood. In her own, unique way, the artist manages to 'freeze' what happened in the past – that which is worth remembering. Her first solo show comprises a body of works, including Self-Portraits, Furniture with memory, Sketches, Sunshine and Sleeping body.
Her Self - Portraits capture images of women of all ages as an expression of acceptance over time. Furniture with memory, is an original example of recycling, which is to protect and destroy everyday objects originally designed for people, then forgotten. Sunshine is made up of embroidered bed sheets, hung on lines like laundry, accompanied by a series of photographs of the female body along with a score by film composer, Stanisław Syrewicz, who de-constructed his compositions, and reassigned the fragments to different parts of the art work.
Sleeping body, in turn, was created especially for the exhibition. Based on the original relationship between light and its reflection, it transforms the interior of the gallery in a mystical space. In the two two last projects, the artist included photographs by Barbara Czartoryska.
Prace/Works follows the relationship between the artistic work and product design. Agnieszka Lasota draws on typically female crafts and activities, transforming them into artistic fetish items with an extremely strong emotional charge. They are a very personal record of the artist's experience: a kind of artistic notebook.
As Marika Kuźmicz writes in the exhibition catalogue, the whole project is above all a profound criticism of utility, involving the need to identify social needs and responses. On the other hand, the formal nature of all of Lasota's projects is a gesture of opposition to the media to promote domestic designer brands on the Polish market. She criticises not only the merits of the younger generation, but also new everyday items, mindlessly accepted by the consumerist society, while making reference to extreme examples of the objectification of man and the flesh.
Agnieszka Lasota graduated from the Faculty of Interior Design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (1996) and postgraduate studies at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan (2006). She has worked as creative director of Fashion TV Poland, and was associated with Twój Styl magazine, where she led the interior design department. She participated in numerous exhibitions, fairs and festivals of art and design in Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Berlin, Milan, London and Brussels.
Curator: Alicja Klimczak-Dobrzaniecka.
The exhibition runs between January 7 - February 5, 2011
Galeria Design
ul. Świdnicka 2-4, 50-067 Wrocław
Director: Marek Puchała
tel. (+48 71) 790 25 86, 790 11 93