Images 1 of 2

Honza Zamojski. “Monumental Statues”

13.8.2011 - 18.9.2011

Statues related to titles that together create an abstract poem (listing: “Shadow”, “Mathematics”, “Leftovers”, “Camping”, “Excitement”, “Post Office”, “The Clan”, “Sugar”, “Reflection”, “Stairs”) will be accompanied by a monocolor zine with shapes immanent in the space for the exhibition to-be. Before coming to the final title “Monumental Statues” a preliminary title of the exhibition was “New Drawings”: projects of monumental statues revealing an idea of exhibition to be connected to paper or its objects being made from paper.

After a big solo show at the LETO Gallery (“Me, Myself and I”, June 25 – July 31, 2011) with a huge complex installation of artist’s personal cosmology and shortly before another exhibition during “Spojrzenia” contest in Zachęta (Zachęta National Gallery of Art), Honza Zamojski here at Kim? will do something else and in a different manner. This will be another kind of an exhibition, lighter and more ironic. We happily agreed on this! And really, who wouldn’t want an exhibition to be something more like music EP before releasing an official LP. (To have fun with paper during times like these.)

The official narrative of the exhibition leads the artist to try new things, to have less stories to tell but avoiding pretentiously empty formalism at the same time. Everything you will see will be made on the spot from everyday objects, wood, pencil and collected things brought from a carpenter shop in the neighborhood of the Central Market.

This is a showroom of projects of monumental statues. They will remain only as ‘projects’ made of paper and/or other small objects. The only monumentalism here will be the one you (the viewer) will grasp while observing the order and placement of the sculptures collocated on the floor. This monumentalism may change the way of viewing as normally we look up at monuments, this time we will need to look down. The sizes of the sculptures will depend on gravity: some of them may be big and some of them should be small.

Repetition, reproduction, human scale versus object scale will join in unison of visual utopia of (seemingly) senseless thinking. At the end of the day “Monumental Statues” will not provide an easy answer, not even it will be frankly positive to react on your how’s made questions.

After exhibition ends, sculptures will undergo a calm liquidation as “they will be just ‘projects’ made of simple materials”.

Honza Zamojski (1981) lives and works in Poznań, Poland. Artist has graduated from the Graphic Design and Visual Communication faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. He works with mixed-media, and, as the artist himself has pointed out, creates his works around several complementary notions such as chance, order, repetition and temporariness.

Zamojski has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Poland and abroad. His first experience with Latvian art scene was in 2010, when Zamojski had a double exhibition together with a Latvian artist Miks Mitrēvics titled “Not There” at the LETO Gallery in Warsaw. Honza Zamojski also works as a curator and was a co-founder of the Starter Gallery in Poznań, now located in Warsaw. He runs a small publishing house MORAVA (its latest project was a temporal bookshop in a form of exhibtion “Bookie” that took place in July in a new home of the magazine “Piktogram”, Warsaw, and among other publications included “Archive Books”, “Dexter Siniter”, “Institute of Social Hypocrisy”, “Paraguay Press”, “Slavs and Tatars”). Zamojski’s publications will be on view at the Kim? library during the exhibition.

Zane Onckule

Support: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Riga, Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Hanza Hotel, Dirty Deal Café, Radio Naba, TVNET, Valmiermuižas alus, Restaurant Kitchen