VANITAS – Anatomy of Absence

I curated VANITAS – Anatomy of Absence at the Museum in Gostyń as a focused look at transience without decoration or pathos. The exhibition takes absence as its starting point – traces left by events, choices, relationships, and people. Works move from quiet still life to gesture and pause, from consciously “aged” material to near-silence, asking what remains when something – or someone – is gone, and whether lack can become a new form of presence.

Alongside more than twenty members of the Poznań Artistic Work Association and invited guests, I presented two paintings from my ongoing series: Okruchy… I and Okruchy… II (mixed media on canvas, 100 × 80 cm, 2025). They gather what time leaves behind – shifts of light, broken edges, the soft erosion of memory. Each canvas is anchored by a quiet sentence: a fragment from Christina Rossetti’s Remember that turns remembrance into an intimate, almost tactile space.

As curator, I shaped the exhibition’s rhythm and invited artists who speak to this idea through different media and registers. I’m especially glad I could bring a friend from Riyadh – Mohammed Selah Alaameri – to join the dialogue with his own perspective on impermanence and the ethics of looking and the artist Anna Woźniak (privately my wife).

Opening: Wednesday, 8 October, 5:00 PM (report on the museum’s official website)
Venue: Museum in Gostyń, 5 Kościelna Street
Artists: over twenty members of PSPT and invited guests