Stanisław Drożdż, Optimum (Minimum-Maximum), detail, 1967, typescript on paper, 29,8x20,2 cm, photo: press release
The current exhibition at Gallery ŻAK | BRANICKA sets the work of Polish artist Stanisław Dróżdż in the realm of Concrete Poetry against the conceptual, word-based art of Carl Andre and Robert Barry
This exhibition brings together Stanisław Dróżdż's most important original works from the 1960s - including Forgetting, Uncertainty-Hesitation-Certainty (1967), Duration (1968), Life-Death (1969), Loneliness (1967), Algebra of Prepositions (1987), Permutations (1989) - and one of his key numeric works Untitled (Numerical Texts) shown in 1974 in Foksal Gallery, Warsaw.
The show places these works into the greater context of art from that period, featuring such pieces as the 1971 slide projection by Robert Barry and the textual works of Carl Andre from the 60s and 70s. What connects the works of these artists is the analysis of words and their relation to space in both the intellectual and physical sense. They are simultaneously text and image, existing at once in the flat dimension, in space and in meaning.
The exhibition title Minimum Maximum is a quotation from Dróżdż's work entitled Optimum from 1967. The graphic arrangement almost imperceptibly merges the opposing meanings, creating a classic coincidentia oppositorum - a unification of opposites. The opposition of meanings is explored in the works shown in this exhibition on a number of levels - such as image and word, content and form, materiality and virtuality, surface and space, black and white, in the binary system as well as in the philosophical division of good and evil.
The basis of Stanisław Dróżdż's works are always short texts or words. These evolve into images and are put into a new context by destroying their semantic meanings through a specific connection or arrangement on a flat layer or in space. In 1967, still unaware of the existence of Concrete Poetry, Dróżdż started writing a type of poetry, which he called Concept Shapes and whose form reflected its content. Dróżdż thought of himself as a poet, yet his technique involved the graphic aspect of words through which the practice of viewing became a process of understanding words and their various levels of meaning. Even then, Dróżdż was interested in the connection between words and space. In his most famous work Untitled (in-between) (Foksal Gallery, 1977), the word is written into the space of the gallery.
Carl Andre and Robert Barry studied the spatial relations of words early on in their careers as well. Since the 1970s Robert Barry has created slide projections with individual words, photography and text fragments, in which he works with language as a medium. From his earliest work up to those word-spaces that are well known today, he searches for spatial experiences and dimensions. Zdenek Felix accentuated in the foreword of the exhibition Robert Barry at the Folkwang Museum (1978) what this genre of art demands of the viewer:
It reduces the visual information to a minimum and challenges the imagination and the emotional, intellectual and last but not least, aesthetic range of the viewer to its maximum. Barry's works - slide projections, prints, books, drawings etc - circle more than one rational or theoretical complexes without ever defining them...
Carl Andre, on the other hand, has treated words (notation, shape and sound) much like sculpture, makin use of poetry written in the 1960s either by hand or typewriter.The exhibition comprises the numerical and wording works of Stanisław Dróżdż, in which the artist tests the principles according to which both of these systems function (language or mathematics) and tries to list all possible combinations. Language is for him a system of sets where he runs through all possible operations. This is excellently demonstrated in his work Algebra of Prepositions, a geometric illustration of possible combinations ofprepositions. The similar work Permutations is a record of all the letter combinations in the word permutation.
The search for the rules of combination led Dróżdż to the work Alea Iacta Est, which was exhibited in the Polish pavilion on the Venice Biennale in 2003, and in which the walls of the pavilion were covered with all 46,656 possible combinations of 6 playing die.
Stanisław Dróżdż (1939-2009) was the most famous creator of Polish Concrete Poetry. In 1968, he debuted in the no longer extant gallery Pod Mona Lisą in Wrocław, and from 1971 on he worked continuously with Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. In 1979 he published the book Concrete poetry. Selected Polish texts and documentation from the years 1967-77. He was in constant contact with representatives of Concrete Poetry from around the world such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Eugen Gomringer and Vaclav Havel. In 2003 he represented Poland at the 50th Venice Biennale.
Exhibition opens on June 11 and runs through September 4, 2010
Galeria Żak-Branicka
Lindenstr. 34-35
10969 Berlin
www.zak-branicka.com
Source: www.zak-branicka.com