The joint exhibition by Artur Żmijewski and Paweł Althamer grows out of the practice of encounter – moments in which distinct artistic languages relinquish their autonomy and authorship disperses within an extended, shared process. Duo exhibitions are often framed as a “dialogue”; what unfolds here, however, is closer to coexistence: an intimate, sustained exchange in which the visual layer becomes a filter for reflecting on the human condition, nature, ethnicity, and the entanglement of cultures.

From this union, a narrative emerges in the in-between space – a meditation on subjectivity in transition, on human and non-human matter, on the figure subjected to deformation, duplication, and division. Each work is formed as a single body, making it impossible to distinguish the individual contribution of either artist. What comes into being exceeds both of them, guided by two imaginations acting in concert.

The outcome of this shared process is a body of collaboratively produced works that continue to exist in a state of incessant dialogue. Drawing on found and archival objects, the artists create full-scale metal sculptures – studies of heads and anatomical fragments – that are spiritually extended by the drawings and paintings. The sculptural human silhouette is not conceived as a classical exercise in form, but as a site of negotiation between the shared and the irreconcilable. The paintings bear traces of division, resembling the record of a conversation: tense, stratified, at times brutal. The drawings vibrate with friction and an inability to synchronise, as if two left hands were attempting a single gesture. Questions of ethnicity and bodily agency surface indirectly, through material presence and intensity rather than explicit statement. It’s Time for Us is a conversation that does not strive for resolution, but for continuation.

Curatorial collaboration: Natalia Barczyńska