Anteroom's curator Ory Dessau says the exhibition functions as a sort of proposition:
Made of unsubstantial and unsustainable materials such as cardboard and papier-mâché, the exhibition’s sculptural elements can be regarded as prototypical, life-size models — notional demonstrations exemplifying yet unrealized visions, plans. In addition to the implications of its material and technical level, the conceptual, speculative character of the exhibition is further manifested by its figurative contents, which are essentially associable with states of imagination, illusion, and deception.
Brzeski’s Anteroom links between the world of second-order and first-order realities. The works presented become the threshold between potentiality and factuality, life and afterlife, between the temporal and the eternal.
Anteroom is divided into two sections – the first presents homemade masks while the second is filled with an oversized expressionist shadow in the form of an architectural cardboard model.
The masks produced together with Brzeski's 5-year-old son imitate the face coverings of superheroes such as Ironman, Captain America, Batman and many others. They are a symbolic path from childhood to adulthood and represent a conductor of culturally-constructed rites of passage. The masks obscure the subject's individual identity and at the same time provide him with the illusion of a new personality.
The shadow that dominates the second section spatialises the boy's stretched silhouette and transforms it into a theatrical mock-up of a domestic anteroom.
Olaf Brzeski
Olaf Brzeski is a Polish artist based in Wrocław. His practice is rooted in surrealist visions, which he puts into life via film, three-dimensional sculptures and installations. His comments about his own works do not so much mirror his personal interpretation, but rather narrate fictional stories, illustrated in the artworks or, in fact, made believable through the existence of the latter. This is the way in which Brzeski generates new worlds and their inhabitants.
Brzeski studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. In 2009 he was nominated for the Views – Deutsche Bank Foundation Award. He debuted with a winning sculpture in the competition for the Orange Alternative monument (Pomarańczowa Alternatywa was an underground protest movement, which in the 1980s acted against the communist authorities in Poland).
Olaf Brzeski: Vorraum/Przedsionek/Anteroom
26th November 2015 to 28th January 2016
Polnisches Institut Berlin
Burgstraße 27
0178 Berlin, Germany
Sources: Culture.pl, Polnisches Institut Berlin, compiled by ND, 30 Nov 2015