Norbert Delman invites you into a world where rubble becomes a living material of memory and hope. In the exhibition Shimmering Rubble, you can see how the artist transforms the remnants of urban fabric into metallic ‘buds’ and totems of memory, raising questions about the possibility of rebirth. The exhibition at HOS Gallery in Warsaw is a raw but empathetic story about how the past can become a starting point for new forms of life and action.
Norbert Delman is a Warsaw-born artist whose early practice explored themes of corporeality based on physical culture and a non-verbal narrative derived from the very presence of the body. He touched upon themes of sport, discipline , working with prisoners , bodybuilders, terrains. He experimented with the form and expression of his works, which were exhibited in gyms or floated in swimming pools.
Delman often used team game systems as a performative structure, thus revealing the brutality and theatricality of human relationships. Already his student production of Clare revealed his preoccupation with artists’ ambitions and the need for external validation: the telephone voice of the reviewer became a mirror of the viewer’s longing for approval. Experimentation characterises virtually every project he has realised.
As part of his graduation project at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the artist transformed competition into a literal game of ‘ships’ with people as pawns, where the players’ identities were only revealed after their elimination. In a similar vein, he realised performances from later years: the three-month bodybuilder’s training in ‘S/S/S – Sweat / Suffer / Success’ in 2014 at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop in Scotland and the boxing ‘Sparring’ with a bag labelled ‘you are only second’ at BWA in Zielona Gora in 2015 tested the boundaries between ambition and obsession and posed the question: is the driving force behind human action the desire for success or the fear of failure?
In 2016, he co-founded the Warsaw art sapce Stroboskop przestań eskaerymentu young Polish and foreign artists which was to be under the radar of large institutions or galleries. His most recent artistic activities are the exhibitions Shimmering Rubble, on show at HOS Gallery in Warsaw until 15 November 2025, and Death of a Whale, on show at the Contemporary Museum in Wrocław until 31 January 2026. What makes the former stand out?
The exhibition Shimmering Rubble shows rubble as more than remnants of destruction: it is material, memory and an invitation to renewal. Norbert Delman arranges the fragments of the city like a story of transformation – from multi-generational losses to children’s play on piles of bricks – and turns them into sculptures and situations that connect the past to the present. The rubble on display here exists simultaneously as sculptural raw material and metaphor: a witness to history, an element of the urban fabric and a starting point for new forms of life and creativity. Rather than depicting destruction as an end, the exhibition shows it as a process of reintegration – the past is not cut off, but incorporated into new arrangements of meaning marked by raw presence and unobvious hope.
The artist’s latest practice emerges from the melancholy of the present day, which is dominated by powerlessness, frustration and a sense of powerlessness. The global media discourse creates an image full of the dominant narrative of defeat and crisis, depriving societies of the ability to act causally. Contrary to the Kantian vision of a world free of wars, modernity seems to be bringing about the twilight of humanism. The normalisation of suffering and the constant stream of accounts of armed conflict have become an everyday reality. At the same time, we are stuck in an impasse, a paradoxical guarantor of peace – maintained not by consent but by the threat of violence. The exhibition deals with the disagreement of being entangled in experiencing unstoppable injustice. Delman consciously rejects this monolith of hopelessness, proposing an alternative perspective – of blossoming ruins, metal buds developing over the remains of Warsaw houses scattered on the gallery floor, reminiscent of a dead riverbed, ‘ writes Marianna Łomża in the curatorial text.
Delman turns the debris into an act of tenderness towards the past – he treats the remnants of the city as living material that sustains continuity and allows for rebirth. His installations act as totems of memory: raw, metallic forms grow out of the rubble and protect it at the same time, without allowing the absolute erasure of what was. The creative process is a ritual of repair – welding, disentangling and reassembling the debris become gestures of empathy and emotional discipline. In times of social helplessness, the exhibition does not offer cheap optimism, but a proposal for persistent work on consciousness; the ruins become a place from which the possibilities for transformation emerge.
Norbert Delman’s works can be found in many institutional collections, including the Museum of Warsaw, the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Lublin, the Gustav Seitz Museum in Germany, as well as in numerous private collections. Among the collectors who have recognised the uniqueness of his artistic language are Bartosz Kaczmarek and Karolina Kosińska of Boutique Office. Kaczmarek’s collection, which focuses on street art and contemporary phenomena in Polish art, is an important link in the dialogue between art and business.
Shimmering Rubble exhibition – Norbert Delman
Duration: until 15.11. 2025
Place: HOS Gallery
Dzielna 5 | 00-162 Warsaw
photos: Szymon Kavka
source: Boutique Office(https://boutiqueoffice.pl)
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