“My gesture turns to the human body, ‘that full erogenous zone’, to its most elusive and fleeting sensations. I want to glorify the transient in the folds of our bodies, in the traces left by our earthly passage.” – Alina Szapocznikow declared in 1972.
A year earlier, with the help of photographer Roman Cieślewicz, she had documented twenty of her chewed gums. Displayed on stone blocks, the expressive self-castings made of such an unusual, ‘low’ material, although they remain somewhat on the fringes of the canon of her work, are one of the most modest, but paradoxically the strongest and most intimate manifestos of an artist who bravely flirted not only with photography, but above all with design.
It was the body that led Filomena Smola (b. 1999) to art and then to transcend it with works that, although sculptural, can be used, put to the lips or worn on the hand. “Ever since I was a child, I needed strong impulses, constant stimulation to understand them better, to know where my boundaries were, where hunger and overstimulation began. Movement and touch taught my body awareness.”
From painting, or rather action painting, she progressed to glass. In the United States, where she emigrated to work in a steel mill in the spirit of the American Studio Glass Movement, in rooms heated up to forty degrees Celsius, on constant adrenaline, in a ‘dance’ with a tibia on which she carries a semi-liquid mass, she experienced total integration with herself and the material. She has become one of the few female blowers who propel forms not only with gesture, but with her own breath.
Today, in her works, she processes memories, reworking and reinterpreting old domestic landscapes; she evokes close relationships, the memory of people and places that are no longer there, which she defines as the foundations of language, and identity more broadly. In the fragile and delicate material, she confesses her longing, but also seeks harmony and balance, records lessons about being attentive to the here and now, and tames the loss encoded in the glass – ‘I am interested in a beauty that does not avoid it, but one that accepts it and becomes part of it. For me, it is not an abstract ideal, but something deeply rooted in everyday life,” says Filomena Smoła.
The exhibition Burning Beauty is a meeting of artists who are generational distances apart, yet extremely close – female artists who speak with a clear female voice and who have made their own bodies a tool for artistic expression. Their objects are private mementos of contact with the medium, a sensual experience in which they engage the viewer. Szapocznikow and Smoła, starting from the ephemerality of matter, transfer it to another, existential dimension – one in which existence is inextricably intertwined with transience.
01 OCTOBER – 28 NOVEMBER 2025
Place: OBJEKT Gallery
Curators: Aleksandra Krasny, Anna Grunwald
Set Design: Zofia Kozłowska
Partners: Lalou Wine Bar, Perrier
See also: Events | Art | Culture | Ceramics
