• NEWS

    Zielona Góra | Muzeum Ziemi Lubuskiej - Galeria Nowy Wiek | exhibition: Kortyka – Jeschke. Część wspólna | finissage: October 19. 19 pm

    Russia | Moscow | exhibition: Art-lobster-tart | 6. Moscow International Biennale for Young Art | with the participation of Mateusz Piestrak and Piotr Macha | opens on June 13 at A3 gallery

    Lithuania | Vilnius | ARTVILNIUS’18 | 9th International Contemporary Art Fair | Exhibition and Congress Centre Litexpo | 7 – 10 JUNE 2018

    Berlin | Assembly Gallery Allerstrasse 15 | Piotr Kotlicki | A Lunatic in His Garden | 27-29.04.2018 - during Berlin Gallery Weekend

    Poznań | Assembly Gallery | Benjamin Rubloff | Today | 13.04. — 13.05.2018

    USA | NY 10011 | New York City | 125 W 18TH ST | METROPOLITAN PAVILION | SCOPE Art Show NEW YORK 2018 | Mateusz Piestrak | 8-11.03.2018

    Poznań | Cultural Center ZAMEK | Małgorzata Myślińska | Artist-In-Residence Programme | starts 25.01.2018

    Belgium | Brussels | LE 26 - Galerie Felix Frachon | Piotr Kotlicki | Hotel Europa - Kontynent Des Anecdotes | 11.01. - 11.02. 2018

    Düsseldorf | GATE art zone | Mateusz Piestrak | Modernization | 11.11. 2017 - 1.04.2018

    London | BEERS London | 75 Works on Paper | 16.11. - 23.12.2017
  • Mateusz Piestrak – Non-places

     

    (…) Mateusz Piestrak presents a kind of quasi places and quasi things. On the one hand, they relate to something familiar; on the other hand, they are a product of new times and the associated aesthetics. His non-places lead to transcendental experience, becoming manifestations of existence in depersonalized supermodernity, as Marc Augé refers to the modern world.

    According to Augé, a prominent French anthropologist and ethnologist, similar spaces (including motorway routes, junctions, airports, means of transport, retail outlets and refugee camps) are devoid of their specific features.¹

    These are areas that cannot be defined from an identity,  relational or historical point of view. They are ‘nobody’s’ places. At the same time, being a common good, they belong to everyone. However, since no community is emotionally bound to them, they create merely a contractual rather than community sphere. Such spaces are devoid of cultural reference points. All that is close, homely, valuable is suppressed by cold unification. Man in non-places is left alone, sentenced to solitary interpretation and selection of excessive numbers of messages. Deep relations are blurred. A contact with the Other is strictly limited to the absolute minimum. There is only movement, transit – without reflection, without roots. ‘All consumers of space are thus imprisoned in some kind of cosmology.’²

    Behind the anonymity of people and places is forgetting – the worst form of nonmemory that brings the real threat of loneliness. Mateusz Piestrak’s paintings extend the anthropological significance of Augé’s non-places to make us realize how many such areas exist in our cultural consciousness.

     

    Justyna Gorzkowicz


    ¹ M. Augé, Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, translated by John Howe, London and New York: Verso, 1995, p. 78.
    ² Ibid., s. 72.