Xawery Wolski. Tangles
Central Museum of Textiles, Lodz, PL
23.10.2023 – 28.04.2024

Xawery Wolski is an artist known worldwide mainly for his monumental sculptures. The exhibition at CMWL will present hitherto little-known motifs of the Artist's extensive oeuvre. The selected pieces revolve around the broad theme of weaving and reference traditional textile techniques such as tying, tangling, weaving, lacing, knitting, or crocheting. But the idea of tangling, which is the focus of this exhibition, can also be read as a loose reference to textiles or as a metaphor for intermingling of different cultures, traditions, and human experiences.

Xawery Wolski likes to experiment with different materials. The works that will be displayed at the exhibition were created using paper, bronze, terracotta, wood, rubber, or wire. Most of these resources were collected by the Artist during his numerous trips abroad. Among them are seeds and semi-precious stones from Burma, black earth from Mexico, cotton from India, and raw silk from Thailand. The Artist extracts them from their original culture and, while preserving their essence, creates works that present them in a completely new context. The exhibition will feature several of the Artist's sculptural realizations but also photographs, works on paper, and installations that are examples of surprising combinations of materials and techniques: crocheting from wire, weaving from blades of grass, combining ropes with terracotta beads or firing monumental tunics from clay.

The Artist emphasizes the essence of artistic craftsmanship, which is a unique combination of the work of the mind, imagination, and human hands. Craftsmanship, which is a form of meditation, poetic expression, quieting and an intellectual task. Understood in this way, craftsmanship is the antithesis of the process of automation and mechanization of work in industrial-scale manufacturing. It is a human response to rigidly defined rules of the manufacturing process.

Xawery Wolski was born in Warsaw in 1960. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris, and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. He has taken part in several artist residency programmes, spending a lot of time in India and Southeast Asia. His artistic explorations took him to Peru (1994) and a year later to Mexico, where he worked for more than 25 years. He has since returned to Poland, currently living and working in his ancestral hometown of Dańków.

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Partners of the „Xawery Wolski. Tangles” exhibition are: Fundacja Artystyczna Podróż Hestii and ERGO HESTIA S.A.
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Xawery Wolski. Tangles
26.10.2023-28.04.2024
Curator: Jarosław Lubiak
Exhibition coordinator: Przemysław Purtak
Printing coordinator: Aleksandra Kmiecik
Object conservation: Agata Pawelec, Marlena Wiśniewska i Justyna Małek
Visual identification: Grafixpol

More information: https://cmwl.pl/public/informacje/xawery-wolski-sploty,319