NANZUKA is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition of new works by Polish artist Agnieszka Brzezanska. This will be her first solo exhibition in Japan.

Agnieszka Brzezanska graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk and Warsaw, after which she spent three years staring in 1998 in a study abroad program at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. She has been based in Berlin and Warsaw since her return to Europe, and in recent years has shown her work in a number of solo exhibitions to high acclaim, major shows including I love you. Be good, Marlborough Contemporary, London (2013), A Painting Cycle, Nomas Foundation, Rome (2012), Back to the Garden, Galerie Kamm, Berlin (2012), Sound Waves, Light Waves, Dance Waves, Clifton Benevento, New York (2011), and Cosmic Equation, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2010).

Brzezanska is mostly interested in alternate systems of meaning and parallel realities. She seeks the common denominator between seemingly distanced fields, and her process hints at an unraveling of her creative activity. She has a spirit of curiosity that lends her a vast imagination, on the one hand inspired by the structure of the universe and the forces that are shaping it, for example, and on the other hand observing and deciphering the microscale world where germs and parasites live their everyday lives.

For the upcoming exhibition, she will be showing a new series of works combining the three elements of panel painting, glass painting, and photography. Her intricate images that feature, for example, an interweaving of photographs depicting the sort of disasters and accident sites that appear in her works, geometric configurations of gold leaf on glass, and panel paintings of tiny people in abstract lines and composition, can be taken as signifying the whole of today’s society, and can also be interpreted as a mirror that reflects ourselves as viewers.

In Brzezanska’s works, the body (embodiment) is a major keyword. For an artist that works in a wide range of genres including painting, video art, and photography, her interest in the theme of parallel and mutual interactions such as nature and artifact, science and philosophy, and intellect and spirituality, constantly takes her own embodiment and reduces it to the product of her work. One could call this dynamic and unpredictable black box the very mystery that pushes Brzezanska’s art to a sublime and inimitable level.

The artist will be returning to Japan for the first time in many years for the exhibition, and an opening reception with the artist will be held on April 5 (Sat) starting at 18:00.

*KOBAYASHI MARU is the fictional spaceship appears in the film Star Trek II : The Wrarth of Khan, and Star Trek the eleventh film of the Star Trek film franchise.It is a fictional existence in Star Trek universe, and is a training exercise called KOBAYASHI MARU scenario designed to the cadets at Starfleet Academy in the 23rd century, described as a no-win scenario, or a solution that involves redefining the problem. Thereby, the candidates must fail at the end of this exercise despite their efforts, and that results inevitable total defeat.Namely, it is a test to observe how they react, how they turn out the desperate situation, and if they operate in the right way until the end.