Raster

Olaf Brzeski

14 Dec 2013 - 15 Feb 2014

© Olaf Brzeski
OLAF BRZESKI
At Heart
14 December 2013 – 15 February 2014

It is with a remar­kable sense of imagination that Olaf Brzeski rein­ter­prets the tradition and scope of sculp­ture. He is interested in both its physical dimen­sion – weight, mass, texture – and its sheer poten­tial; the possibility and impos­sibility of inscribing cer­tain phenomena or nar­ratives into a material form. Many of the artist’s works refer direc­tly to the human form, enac­ting not so much the physical as the emotional depths of the sub­ject. Brzeski’s sculp­tural bodies are replete with the unexpec­ted, the uncanny, the unnatural and the over­sized. The source of these fan­tastic, astonishing forms is always the idea, then the sketch – as the sim­plest metaphor for the act of creation.
Brzeski’s first solo exhibition at Raster is entitled ‘At Heart’ and presents a single piece of sculp­ture created especially for the event. As the artist says him­self, ‘It’s only the one piece because if you factor in the heart – nothing else mat­ters. I hope that you can per­ceive this banality with an appropriate dose of sensitivity’.
The sculp­ture is essen­tially the product of an inten­sive process, the artist grap­pling with the material over the course of several weeks – the material being a several-hundred-kilo steel rod 26 cm thick and 187 cm long. During the process Brzeski made use of all the tools available to him: drills, files, mills and grinders.
‘At Heart’ is an extreme test of the sculp­tural genre, as well as a charac­teristic figure of the impos­sible, both lyrical and oppres­sive at once. Open-​heart sur­gery that ven­tures into a dan­gerous obses­sion.
 

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