Kasia Fudakowski
Zak Branicka, Berlin, Germany
Zak Branicka is a relative newcomer to the Berlin art scene, having only recently joined the colony of spaces on Lindenstrasse, though, with a lively roster of brilliant young Polish artists and some sharp exhibitions, the gallery has already made quite an impression. ‘Gleaning the Gloss’ is Kasia Fudakowski’s first solo show with the gallery and brings together a dozen new sculptures that work more like an elaborate installation in 12 acts. The sculptures occupy the gallery space like cast members of a theatrical production, clustered backstage gossiping and waiting for their cue. Artificial pinks, pearlescent lacquer and canary yellows punctuate tertiary shades, while forms emerge from these part-objects, made in resin, rigid foam, Perspex, wood and plaster. Fudakowski’s work seems both organic and synthetic, bringing together both figurative and abstract forms, ready-made and highly constructed materials.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, Fudakowski’s work puns on the shiny surfaces of her carefully sanded and painted forms, while seeking to extricate meaning that may have been left behind during previous interpretations and explanations. Knackered is for Horses (2009) plays on the knacker’s yard and the British slang expression (meaning ‘tired’) that originates with it. An pink ovule form is stretched on a steel frame, appearing both exhausted and taut. The end of the piping is hoof-like, suggesting a horse hung out to bleed dry, while a wire mesh of buzzing flies surrounds it.
There are secret intentions and narratives behind Fudakowski’s works. Many of these sculptures directly mimic human forms and characters by making gentle anthropomorphic gestures. In Der Angler (2009) a fishing rod and figure become one. The spot where the fishing line parts the imaginary water is fixed as a steel circle, and below arcs a shoal of fish, each held in a Perspex frame. The shoal hovers over a pile of food, the perfect accompaniment to fish: chips. But there is also a performative physicality about the work and its encounter. In Obstruction 1, Obstruction 2 and Obstacle (all 2009), three large movable phallic plaster oblongs on steel frames divide and block the gallery space. Deliberately placed at abdomen- and shoulder-height, they physically control the flow of people milling around them. The sculptures – like many of the forms that are repeated throughout Fudakowski’s pieces – are like stylistic punctuation marks, dictating the aesthetic intonation and pauses to be observed, as if you are asked to read the works aloud. Fudakowski’s work also traces social and cultural processes. In That’s how they’re grown and That’s how its leaked (both 2009), six forms spurt like thick oil from an outbox on a desk, and seem to be evacuated in a sculptural yellow leak at the other end, as if mimicking corporate production processes, or the acquisition and evacuation of knowledge.
In Spiner (2009), a sullen spider creeps across the gallery space, perhaps playfully doffing its author’s cap to Louise Bourgeois, that great matriarch of the monumental and surreal, the resemblance clearly stating the gendered subtext of her sculpture so that the viewer doesn’t have to. There is certainly something of the bulbous, latex forms of Bourgeois’s Cumul (1968) in Fudakowski’s sculpture, and a similarly part-erotic, part-macho theatricality. But Fudakowski’s work don’t sit comfortably in a feminist context; it extends beyond trite art historical self-referentiality. In German the name for a word with two different meanings is Teekesselwort, literally a ‘teapot word’, which is also the name of a children’s word guessing game. There is something perfectly apt about this playful concept in terms of Fudakowski’s sculpture, which thrives on the ambiguity that lurks between formal and linguistic resolutions, coquetting with heteronyms and hiding in homographs.
Sarah James
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