02.06.2023 / 18:00 / exhibition until 27.06.2023 / B&B Gallery of Photography, Włókniarzy Municipal House of Culture, 12 1 Maja Street, Bielsko-Biała
Andrzej Gruden's series presented at the exhibition build a multithreaded story constructed solely from self-portraits. This common denominator sets the exhibition in the area of deeply subjective and emotional photography. This applies both to the original motivation behind the works and to the way they affect the viewer. Each series of photographs explores the area of exploring the "self" and the author's subjective reactivity in its own unique way.
The series of pinhole photographs entitled Initiations is a photographic record of the time of mental transformations that we cyclically and inevitably undergo in the process of maturing into the next stages of life. The photographs were created as projections on photosensitive material of what was happening inside their author. Thus, they externalize what is so difficult to render, to show to oneself and to the world. Making this effort as a creative gesture, however, turned out to be a valuable diagnosis and testimony to the time of internal crises and transformations we are experiencing. Long exposure times, multiple exposures, the artistic qualities of the camera obscura tool - all this makes the resulting images seem to go beyond representational literalism, they begin to live beyond space and time, gaining a poetic dimension and universal character.
The next series of works titled Identity are digital modifications of Andrew December's face. Modifications that surprise the viewer with changing proportions of the face, giving it more and more new features - at the same time preserving the recognizability and personal integrity of the protagonist. We look at them as successive "versions" of him. We look for him in each of these faces, assigning them different social roles, guessing status, age, way of life. This play with the viewer leads us to reflect on the fact that each of us is one possible version of ourselves. The only one realized, the only one accomplished among the countless hypothetical possibilities that will forever remain beyond us.
Another set are photographic objects entitled Embryos. In the depths of black boxes were enclosed photographs of a naked male figure. Trapped, hidden, or perhaps happily inhabiting the safe space of six walls? It all depends on the interpretation of the viewer, who, looking inside the object through the thick glass of the photographic lens, discovers a new "tool" of looking, giving photography a surprising dimension.
The last series presented as part of the exhibition, entitled Symbiosis, are photographs touching on the subject of man in the natural world. It tells of visual explorations of the interface between man (and his body) and nature - which surpasses us and is never fully comprehensible. It is an area of philosophical questions about our human nature - man as a being originally blended into the tissues of the world around him, naturally feeling it on a deeply biological level, and contemporarily denying this connection. A man lost in technicized realities, tired and doomed to a sense of lack. At the same time, increasingly aware of the need to restore that life-giving connection, to rebuild it within himself.
Jolanta Rycerska
Gallery curator: Inez Baturo [326th exhibition].
Gallery Supervisor: Emilia Grala
Andrzej Grudzień - Born in 1973, an artist photographer.
His work can be characterized as a transgressive search in photography. Member of the Union of Polish Artists Photographers (ZPAF). Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture, National Heritage and Sports. Lecturer and director of the ZPAF Photography Studio in Warsaw, where he teaches analog photography. Vlogger, creator of the series of talks "Fotoforma Live - From passion to photography". Organizer of numerous training courses and photography workshops. Actively presents his works at individual and collective exhibitions in Poland and abroad.