Zofia Rydet: Endlessly Distant Roads

Free
Venue Raster
Address ul. Wspólna 63, Warszawa
Entry Free
Venue's website en.rastergallery.com

Zofia Rydet (1911-1997), author of the iconic Sociological Record and the fantastic World of Feelings and Imagination, was an artist endowed with a special sense of observing the entropy of the world around her. This unique photographic perspective is revealed in full force in the series Zofia Rydet: Endlessly Distant Roads, made in 1980. The exhibition at Raster will present a selection of 40 photographs from this unusual and rarely presented collection.

The author described it as a metaphorical story about life and roads and gave it the structure of a paraconceptual typology, which juxtaposes images of empty roads, road signs and crosses fleeing towards the horizon. Despite the universalist idea, the individual photographs have an individual character, and the whole – regardless of the symbolic meaning – can also be read as an original story about the Polish landscape. The artist takes a closer look at its meaningful details – cheaply decorated roadside and cemetery crosses with cast figures of the crucified, ruts in dirt roads or holes and cracks in asphalt roadways. The aching materiality of these inalienable elements of the everyday landscape emphasises all the more the metaphysical meanings inscribed in them. Incredibly abstract and tangibly concrete, metaphysical and real – this is how critic Jerzy Busza characterised the space depicted by the artist. Discovering the trajectory of human fate from the crumbs of local material culture is a particular feature of Rydet's photographic practice. Her photographs, poignantly simple, sometimes even austere, are at the same time dense with details and textures. What at first appears poor surprises with diversity and richness. The semiotic landscape created by Rydet surprisingly combines different orders of photographic observation: typological document and creative photography. The images registered on the negative are often further processed by the artist using the technique of solarisation, which makes the shots unreal and gives them a cosmic aura. After all, in this specific microcosm, played out on a grey scale, according to the artist's words only one direction of movement towards death is certain.

The exhibition in Raster is available alongside the exhibit of Alicja Pakosz Vortices.

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