Artist: Joanna Piotrowska

“I always focus on staging and gestures, working with the body, arranging certain situations between people, or between people and their surroundings. It is a performative activity, which is why I often say that my photographs are documentations of little performances.” –Joanna Piotrowska 2020

Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris presents a solo exhibition by Joanna Piotrowska in the space at 66 rue du Temple. The artist presents an original installation of black-and-white silver prints, collages and photograms. With a scenography specially designed for the exhibition, she conjures up a strange, dreamlike atmosphere that echoes her childhood memories and our collective unconscious, creating a kind of intimate setting where fragments of bodies and objects, and people of the past and present, interact.

Staged using a large curtain and a pink carpet that uniquely combine theatrical and domestic stylings, the exhibition includes works in a variety of framings, compositions and formats which weave subtle links with each other. The first work is emblematic of Joanna Piotrowska's practice of artificial situations and elusive images: a woman, in an obscured profile, leans over and caresses a partially faceless woman lying on the floor, holding her hand as she does so. The two figures, collaged against a background of wood veneer typical of the 1980s furnishings in Poland, where the artist grew up, form a timeless tableau.

In Piotrowska's world, objects also evoke a mysterious presence that resonates with the past, such as a photograph of a small crystal tray on the first wall, or a diptych of bronze horses hanging from a large velvet curtain in the center of the space. These ordinary items have been deliberately placed into uninhabited apartments the artist discoveredonline, as a personal touch, in the hope of arousing the intrigue of a potential buyer. Piotrowska's interest in objects in general, especially with those that are part of the domestic space, stems from the idea that they act as catalysts, and like bodies, can evoke both a personal and collective memory.

On the third wall of the exhibition, the prints convey a fragmentary, surreal presence, where the combined imagery functions like a dream or a memory, uniting all the elements to become one. Among the fragments is a close-up of the artist's mother's face, taken by her father in the 1980s before she was born. The cropped portrait, combined with a photogram of her own profile created with an enlarger implies an atypical intimacy between the two women, while also symbolizing the union of two gazes, that of father and daughter. This collage, in which past and present, and mother and daughter, seem to merge, echoes another print hung on the same wall, in which the mouths of a mother and a daughter are so close they seem to be touching, the unusual positioning being the result, once again, of staging by Piotrowska.

Piotrowska, born in 1985 in Warsaw, Poland, lives and works in London. A graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, she is currently presenting her first solo exhibition at an institution in the United States, unseeing eyes, restless bodies at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia until 1st December 2024. She was awarded the Lewis Baltz Research Fund Award in 2018 and recently received the Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography from the City of Graz, Austria (2023) and the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship for Photography from the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2023).

Other recent exhibitions of Piotrowska's work include Entre Nous at LE BAL, Paris in 2023, Stable Vice at Kunsthalle Basel (2019) and All Our False Devices at Tate Britain (2019). She has participated in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), the 16th Lyon Biennale d'art contemporain (2022) and the 10th Berlin Biennale d'art contemporain (2018). Her work has also been featured in numerous group shows such as at FRAC Île-de-France (2023), Tate Britain (2021) and MoMA New York (2018). Piotrowska's work can be found in the collections of MoMA New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, Tate London, Art Institute Chicago, Kolumba Museum Cologne, Brandhorst Museum Munich and the Arts Council Collection UK, among others.