&

The exhibition & was an attempt to dive into artistic practice and aesthetic experience. It was an invitation to enter a world composed of mazes, déjà-vu, subtle similarities, strange symmetries and unexpected discoveries.

Paying an indirect and discreet homage to Gilles Deleuze’s doctoral thesis titled Difference and Repetition, the coordinating conjunction AND, associating two words, became the title of the exhibition but was reduced to a typographic sign (called ampersand in English), an abstract symbol resembling a maze or an infinite loop.

Many artists might tell you: an artwork often repeats its predecessor but carries on something slightly different. There is an inherent repetition in artistic practice based on the hope that the next work will always be better than the previous one. But everybody can also easily get lost by repeating the same gesture over and over, the same situation, without noticing that it became a trap. So are our days: we sometimes feel as if we are living in a maze where all paths will inevitably lead us to a similar place, whilst we are still hoping that something might change.

The exhibiton, presenting more than a hundred drawings by Wacław Szpakowski, but also a large selection of minimalist works of Cécile Dupaquier, diagrams by Suzanne Treister, videos by Aneta Grzeszykowska, models by Anna Orlikowska, strange visions by Henryk Morel or silkscreens by François Morellet, which played with the principle of difference & repetition to create an exhibition in the shape of an aesthetic maze. 

Not only minimalism and abstraction are strongly linked historically to the concepts of difference & repetition, the actual technologies that we use in our everyday activities are also regulated by these words. They become the rules of a game that could be a labyrinth, an artwork, the Internet, our lives, but where, at the end, we might not find an exit.

Artists: Cécile Dupaquier, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Henryk Morel, François Morellet, Anna Orlikowska, Wacław Szpakowski, Suzanne Treister 

Coordinator: Katarzyna Mróz

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