Mala Gallery ZPAF-CSW
8, Zamkowy Sq., Warsaw
February 29 - March 24, 2000
Witold Wegrzyn, "Situations III - Table", Mala Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, March 2000.
"Through photography the world becomes series of disconnected free particles while both history and the present time become mere collection of anecdotes. A photographic camera atomizes reality, manipulates it and distorts. It is a vision of the world that denies natural ties and continuity, the vision that wraps every moment in nimbus of mystery."
John Berger "On seeing"
- The table -
The table - signifying object, embracing many functions, features and meanings, a place of innumerable situations, possesing identity, tradition, history and a legend of its own. The object that exists in its own defined time, recalling lines of another times, presumptive or probable, realted to its history and to the events that accompanied this history - the testimony of merciless passage of time, its erosion, transition.
The table - image of an object, graphic picture, sematic, anarrative, symbolic, even metaphoric. The image of peace and aggression, reality and unreality (surreality), the image of document and relativity of truth, of self-contained being, the being that overgrows itself, the generalized being. The table means home, warmth, family, continuation, tradition, filling in, recalling ..
"A table" is one of the first pictures in the begining of photography's history ...
Witold Wegrzyn
January 2000
Witold Wegrzyn, "Situations III - Table", Mala Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, March 2000.
Witold Wegrzyn, "Situations III - Table", Mala Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, March 2000.
FTER several exhibitions of colour photographs Witold Wegrzyn has decided to return to black and white pictures. It is black and white photography that brings us recently closer to graphic arts, especially when it focuses our attention on small fragments of reality.
The main protagonist of the series "Situations III" is a table - as an object upon which a history unrolls - the history of wealth and variety that every day brings but also of some recurrent rituals for which this table is designed. The table as a witness of the passing time is called here in a specific way: we can see some fragments of scratched surface reminding some cartographic records, there are photographed fragments of wood that was used for making the table's top but also objects that remind us a bread turned stone. Thus these all things are symbolic objects related to life, perseverance, transition. But the most intriguing are photographs that the artist has put on this table and photographed them once again trying to expand and enhance the notion of the table - the symbol of our existence.
This series is also an attempt to reveal relation between an object and its image on the surface of time. Photographing what was already photographed in context of the same object allows for a new interpretations concerning thesis that photography is a simple representation of reality.
Marek Grygiel
Witold Wegrzyn, "Situations III - Table", Mala Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, March 2000.
Witold Wegrzyn
born 1945
From 1971 member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. He participated in more than 300 exhibitions in Poland and abroad.
Individual exhibitions:
1968 - Klub Wiezowiec - BPBK, Gdansk
1970 - PWSSP, Pasaz Zbrojowni, Gdansk
1975 - Penetracje, Gdansk, Olsztyn, Lodz, Grudziadz
1978 - Rekonstrukcje krajobrazu, Galeria GN, Gdańsk; BWA Slupsk
1980 - Dokumentacja - czarne prostokaty, Galeria GN, Gdansk
- Individual exhibition, Bremen, Germany
1985 - Slad, Galeria ZPAF, Gdansk; "Foto-Medium-Art", Wroclaw
- Fotografia bez fotografii, Galeria "Punkt", Gdańsk; Galeria FF, Lodz
1988 - Znak-synteza-asceza, Galeria Fotografii, Ladek Zdroj
1989 - Sytuacje I, Galeria Fotografii, Bielsko-Biala
- P-fotografia - Galeria MPiK, Gdansk; Galeria ZPAF, Torun
1990 - After Man Ray - Striped House Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan
- Individual exhibition, Rarhaus-Greven, Germany
1991 - Gummidrucke und andere Edeldrucke, Galeria Grauwert, Hamburg
- Ulica (with Stefan Figlarowicz), BWA Sopot
1997 - 1000 letni Gdansk (with Krzysztof Izdebski), Hamburg, Gdansk, Paris
1998 - Sytuacje II - ingerencje i interwencje, Nadbaltyckie Centrum Kultury, Akademia Sztuk Pieknych,Gdansk; Galeria FF, Lodz (1999)
Witold Wegrzyn, "Situations III - Table", Mala Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, March 2000.
Witold Wegrzyn, "Situations III - Table", Mala Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, March 2000.
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