beginning / Friday 01.09.2017, 6pm
Entropia performance
About himself
I was born in 1957 in Koronowo, in a house that stood near an old brickyard. In this brickyard I, a little boy, was allowed to take a piece of clay in my hand for the first time. I started to model my dream figurines right away. Apart from feeling happy, I was also anxious and worried not to break anything that was just being created. The peace came when my first fired sculptures stood between bricks in the brick ovens.
Clay has accompanied me for a long time and does not leave me as a creative material – it’s always ready for metamorphosis. And I know that already dried or burned out, it is still fragile and easy to break. However, this delicacy seduces and provokes me every time.
And the mirror and its images, which I have known for a long time as the simplest form of self-identification, remain with me until today. The mirror, whether it is glass, crystal or sheet metal, has a distinct feature for me – of fugacity and distortion of the images created in it.
And what is a piece of cardboard for me, driven over by one or dozen of cars, which was previously harp packaging and, to protect them, the word FRAGILE was printed on it (brittle, fragile, delicate, perishable)? Looking within myself for an answer to this question, I raise this piece of cardboard and nominate it to the sculpture status.
Raising up this piece of cardboard, which fights my aesthetics with its simplicity, or carrying a tin mirror on my back, I very clearly and strongly feel my own tenderness and temporariness.
What is important to me in Performance
Simple presence at any artistic activity gives the viewer the possibility to observe, reflect or take part in an action. There is also a state in which the viewer can only witness an event, without participating and reflection. Performance calculates such states as necessary when the thought cannot or does not want to keep up with the dynamics of events. And in such moments a free state is created, without classification, without attempting to immediately understand – a state that gives the viewer the freedom necessary for free and unlimited interpretation.
Piotr Alexander Grodzki
Piotr Alexander Grodzki was born in 1957 in Koronowo. He specializes in wood sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, installation and performance. Since 1988, he’s been living in Berlin. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (1977-1978), at the private Fine Arts School of the Papkin Brothers in Berlin (1993-1994), Ernst Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald (2010-2015) – bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, Philosophy and History of Arts and Master’s degree in Arts at the Casper David Fridrich Institute (diploma in Prof. Ulrich Puritz’s studio). Since 1994, he has been working with the FRGZS (Factory of Sculptures Talking to Each Other) “Mózg” in Bydgoszcz, he’s also cooperated with the now defunct Artistic Association “Wieża Ciśnień” in Bydgoszcz. In 1996–2001, he was a member of the Association of Visual Artists Berlin and the Association of Polish Visual Artists in Bydgoszcz. Since 2010, he’s a member of the Association of Visual Artists “art-cube – space for contemporary art e.V.” in Greifswald (Germany). Author of many individual exhibitions and performances, a participant in group exhibitions in Poland and Germany.
end / Friday 22.09.2017, 6pm
Oczyszczenie (Cleansing) performance
