Untitled (Grating)

“The less means the more space for the viewer” – this is how Marzena Nowak constructs her pieces. A steel crate, a few metres high, which welcomed or bid farewell to the viewers during her exhibition in the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń (2011), excellently shows her crafting austerity. What we are dealing with is a ready-made object-gate with a decorative pattern, albeit a simple and repetitive one. Such a gate can still be encountered in the hallways of foyers of residential blocks or tenement houses. Here, the artistic “intervention” boils down to installing the gate on a spinning mechanism between the ceiling and the floor in a large, open exhibition space – thanks to it, it can rotate around its own axis. [A. Dzierżyc-Horniak]