Marlena Kudlicka
CUSTOM STORAGE
29.09 - 2.10.2022

Al. Jerozolimskie 51/2

Three years ago, when Marlena Kudlicka created the artwork velvet mind marble thoughts (2019) at the Sculpture Park of the Orońsko Sculpture Centre, I wrote that her art stemmed from language and writing. Even the words in her sculpture's titles are treated as a "linguistic sculpture" by the artist. They become a generative matrix for material objects. The title Apostrof Katastrof i Imiesłów(Apostrophe of Catastrophe and Participle, 2020) intrigues us with an overrepresentation of the letter "f". "F" appears in Kudlicka's practice multiple times, as a symbol of the formula − the recipe for a sculpture. The equation f=different (2016) also includes the artist's reflection on the unavoidable discrepancy between the concept of an artwork and its material realization. The artist creates precision sculptures, manufactured according to her design in metal and paint workshops. Their production consists in struggling to keep the vertical and horizontal lines, the appropriate thickness of welds and paint, as well as the shape of sockets and connections. This experience is being artistically explored in collages and reliefs analyzing the influence of various factors on the precision of manufacture. The causes of errors might be as elusive as the limitations of calibration of measuring instruments or the influence of gravity on line curvature. At the same time, Kudlicka transfers signs from strictly regulated domains such as typography, technical drawing, calculation and measurement systems, or work ergonomics into the semantically vague world of art. At the same time, her engineering is corporal and poetic both in juxtapositions of "the velvet mind and the marble thoughts", and when she creates "tender arguments" (2022), even though it might also refer to a tender mathematical argument, taking into account the multiple meanings of this word in English. This poetic formula generates the original, sculptural shape of her art − elegant, precise and constructivistic, while at the same time pictorial and spatial.

Dorota Monkiewicz

Projekt dofinansowany z budżetu Miasta Poznania