_ Fabrics from Lublin/ Blawatne z Lublina | Ulrike Grossarth

Fabrics from Lublin/ Blawatne z Lublina

New York/ Łódź/ Dresden, 2007/ 2010

The first work with the archive of photos by Stefan Kiełsznia was entitled friendly thinking babes/ X of the Predicates. It was triggered by the advertising panels for the tailor shops in ulica Nowa. They depict painted bales of cloth, piled obliquely one above another to form a cross, with associated suggestions for decoration. They are reminiscent of abstract bodies, which I reconstructed in 1930s colours according to studies conducted in the Textile Museum in Łódź. I then combined these representations of bodies with figures taken from various fragments belonging to different historical epochs in Western civilization. The heads are reworkings of face-like representations of the sun from 16th-century copperplate engravings by alchemist Michael Maier; the torso is formed by cape and coat models from the illustrated volumes of the 18th-century Encyclopédie by Diderot and d’Alembert; and the limbs are from the 16th-century Iconologia by Cesare Ripa.