Alicja Biała, 'Raw Earth, Rare Earth' at Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery in London
In the exhibition 'Raw Earth, Rare Earth,' her version of an allegorical calendar, Alicja Biała presents plants as active actors in the ecosystem, capable of restoring and supporting the natural balance disrupted by human influence. Rejecting an anthropocentric perspective, the artist proposes a reflection on coexistence and human responsibility towards an ecosystem of which they are not the center, but a part.
Although Alicja Biała's London exhibition is enclosed within the gallery's traditional white cube, the artist does not distance herself from her roots. As one might expect from an artist sensitive to local context and emphasizing the connection between her work and its location, even in the sterile space of a contemporary art gallery, she manages to create something resembling... a garden. In Biała's case, this is not particularly surprising – the artist is already known for her works that explore the environment and human impact on natural surroundings. Here, however, it impresses with its highly successful combination of coherence and scale, the multitude of references and possible interpretations, and the minimalist elegance of the individual works.
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The exhibition is spread over two floors of the gallery – the ground floor and the basement. In the first floor, which opens the show, we can see a series of twelve large brass panels and several smaller ones depicting almost abstract plant motifs. The large panels, representing the twelve months, create a kind of a Renaissance calendar with illustrative allegories relating to the individual seasons. The symbolic drawings are rendered here in polished splashes of precious gold, contrasting with the deep, earthy brown of the brass. The figurative fragments, thanks to their smooth surfaces, also become almost mirrors – reflecting not only the audience but also the sunlight entering the gallery, whose reflections consequently play throughout the exhibition space. In this way, the artist creates a work both to be viewed and, more broadly, to be experienced as a whole – especially when the plant motifs from the plates begin to play on each other in mirrored cascades.
Biała's symbolic drawings, capturing what is most characteristic of a given time period, do not, however, take a literal approach. Unlike Renaissance representations, we will not find here works typical of a given month, ways of spending time, or worn-out iconographic motifs such as a sickle or a basket full of harvested crops. The artist does not exalt vegetation as a whole; nor is she interested in affirming general concepts such as the vital potential of natural forces or the earthly element. On the contrary, her attention is drawn to specific plants with very specific characteristics: so-called hyperaccumulators, plants that grow even in soils polluted with heavy metals, which throughout their life cycle purify the surrounding water and soil by absorbing substances toxic to other organisms.
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Exhibition 'Raw Earth, Rare Earth' by Alicja Biała in London, photo by Kuba Celej / IAM
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The narrative proposed by the artist interestingly shifts the emphasis versus how the art and public debate surrounding environmental issues look like. Biała's work, of course, manifests an awareness of catastrophe – simplified drawings of female figures and precisely drawn, Art Nouveau-style grasses bent in the wind express the extraordinary fragility and vulnerability of the delicate order of nature. At the same time, the majestic panels also radiate a conviction about nature's inherent ability to maintain internal homeostasis. Humans, indeed, pollute the soil, rivers, and oceans, and are responsible for an unprecedented disruption of ecological balance, but nature, as Biała sees it, is by no means a helpless, passive victim, but an actor with its own agency, resiliently inventing ways to cope in moments of crisis. What seems most valuable in the artist's gesture is the visibility of these ultimately obvious processes, occurring daily yet ignored by human subjects.
In this sense, Biała's exhibition is perhaps one of the most interesting proposals in art that transcends the anthropocentric perspective in recent years. She is preoccupied with the possibility of creating a representation of what for years was not considered a worthy or independent subject of art. If nature came to the foreground, it was only as 'still life” immobilized in an aestheticized, studied form and convention. Even paysages, though they had realistic ambitions to depict natural landscapes, served primarily as illustrative works. Rough seas and dark forests revealed human anxieties, while smooth water surfaces and idyllic meadows communicated peace, contentment, and a sense of harmony, but one felt not by nature itself, but by the human being who perceives the landscape.
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Exhibition 'Raw Earth, Rare Earth' by Alicja Biała in London, photo by Kuba Celej / IAM
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Although the artist presents people – not only in the calendar but also on separate panels, where one can see the outlines of human silhouettes entwined as if in a loving embrace or detailed depictions of human hands – they are, contrary to art’s historical tradition, relegated to the role of background. It is plants and the processes they trigger in their ecosystems that constitute the true subject of the portrait. It's striking, moreover, that the human figure is always treated in a pretextual, sketch-like way in Biała's work – different from the much more precisely rendered plants, with their leaves, stems, and roots. For example, in a panel depicting the magma of human bodies, signaled only by an outline that makes it impossible to discern what we're actually looking at. Or in the depicted hands, which, as if in a working sketch, overlap, fork, and interpenetrate.
What might seem like a single hand produces too many fingers – and the drawing of the latter sometimes ends abruptly or gradually fades into the background. Where the human body proves nonfunctional – or at least nonfunctional in the context of traditional expectations of how it should behave and act – plants demonstrate their astonishing agility (and agency). The delicate balance of nature has been preserved.
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Exhibition 'Raw Earth, Rare Earth' by Alicja Biała in London, photo by Kuba Celej / IAM
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An interesting contrast to the luminous transparency of this level of the exhibition is the continuation of the show in the basement – a room with a low-slung ceiling, a characteristic rhythm of concrete beams, a raw concrete floor, and white-painted bricks on the walls. In this space, Biała displays only a few works, but the most important is a chandelier hanging from the ceiling on a chain – a ceramic sculpture with organic shapes, somewhat reminiscent of expanding rhizomes, at the ends of which open spectacular flowers with stamens and stems glowing in the twilight. This is another work from the artist's Spiders series – back in 2022, she exhibited the first objects in the series, referencing traditional folk decorations created primarily by women. Here, however, the organic object takes on particular significance. In the context of the calendar from the first level of the exhibition, the underground Spider reinforces the message of the entire show, ultimately documenting what is invisible to the anthropocentrically focused eye.
Descending to the basement here means perceiving the infinite, eternal processes of earthly metabolism and the actors involved in these processes. Significantly, the ceramic sculpture is accompanied by tiles at the bottom depicting growing tubers, sprouting new growths and rhizomes. Capturing this banal, familiar moment from everyday life highlights the vitality inherent in plants, their tendency to spontaneously construct new forms of life and seek connections with the soil and other plants. Is this so different from an artistic gesture? From a free search for new forms of expression?
It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Alicja Biała's London exhibition is a non-anthropocentric response to Małgorzata Mirga-Tas's Re-enchanting the World – a famous project shown in 2022 in the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The Roma artist, drawing on the famous frescoes from the Schifanoia Palace in Ferrara, Italy, also constructed her version of a Renaissance calendar, in which astrology and the observation of nature intertwined with the everyday life of the Roma community. While Mirga-Tas represented a group previously operating on the margins of cultural visibility, Biała recognizes the agency of nonhuman actors performing the essential yet invisible work of maintaining natural harmony. Her work shifts the focus from humans to the natural world, revealing a network of interdependencies in which each element – plant, mineral, soil – possesses its own agency and significance. She also poses an interesting and challenging question about human responsibility for maintaining this ecosystem – with a disclaimer that human presence no longer marks the center of the entire system, but is merely one of its many components.
Alicja Biała 'Raw Earth, Rare Earth'
Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery, London, September 18–October 25, 2025
This event is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, organised by the British Council, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and the Polish Cultural Institute in London, and funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland.
Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar