Agata Madejska (b.1979, Warsaw, Poland), graduated from Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen in 2007 and the Royal College of Art, London in 2010.

Through post-(and)photographic processes, sculptural interventions, and installation, Agata delves into the multiple ways in which power can be manifest. With their liquidus feel, her works question the smooth façades of language, architecture, and public agreements – forms that hold associative or symbolic value. In turn, Agata poses deeply philosophical questions which demand viewers to think and re-think how we have come to know not only our world but ourselves in this world-space – how and why.

Selected exhibitions include: I Dialogue, Kinch, Belmacz, London (2021); Mother Mercury, Art Night, London (2019), Modified Limited Hangout, Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven (2018), Technocomplex, Parrotta Contemporary Art, Stuttgart (2017); Place. Tlomackie 3/5, Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw (2017); Entoptic Screening, Galeria ASP, Warsaw (2016); Johanna Jaeger & Agata Madejska, Kunstraum griffelkunst, Hamburg (2016); Kingly Things, Chandelier Projects, London (2015); Conflict, Time, Photography, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Albertinum Dresden (2015) and Tate Modern, London (2014); Form Norm Folly, Kunstverein Krefeld, Krefeld (2014); Twisted Entities, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2013); Man and his Objects, Museum Folkwang, Essen (2012); Made in Germany Zwei, kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2012); Menos tiempo que lugar, Palacio National de las Artes, Buenos Aires (2010); reGeneration 2, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2010) and Aperture, New York (2011).Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London (2010). Menos tiempo que lugar, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Quito, Ecuador (2009); Agata Madejska, allerArt, Bludenz (2009); gute aussichten 2007/2008, Goethe Institut, Washington D.C., USA (2008); XIII European Photography Prize Riccardo Pezza, Triennale di Milano, Italy (2008); The poetry of the functional, SMWK, Dresden, Germany (2007); Kodak Nachwuchs Förderpreis, Haus der Wirtschaft, Stuttgart, Germany (2007); Agata Madejska, Projektraum Mikro, Düsseldorf, Germany (2006).

Agata was awarded the renowned Contemporary German Photography award by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation in 2008 and the Emerging Artist Award of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in 2011. She has also been the recipient of public funding awards in both the UK and Germany.

Agata lives and works in London.

Mistakes Were Made

Modified Limited Hangout

Mistakes Were Made, drawings

Tender Offer

The title Technocomplex is a term borrowed from archeology and refers to a collection of found objects from a specific cultural period within a certain geographical space. In her show Madejska deals with architectural, political and ideological space of the City of London, the so called Square Mile. The City of London is an enclave and historical and economical core of Greater London. Over centuries the City has been granted political and judicial privileges, a status which has been embraced by the financial and investment sector. The boundaries of the City are marked by 11 iron cast dragons placed on tall plinths, which a passer-by can only see from below.

Anna Gritz writes in her essay: In her new series (Tender Offer, 2017), Madejska focuses on these curious insignias of power through photographing the dragons from below using a close crop of the testicles in question. The perspective of the wandering observer is one that she has occupied herself on her many walks of the perimeters of the city, walks that she has been undertaking with increased frequency in the wake of the EU referendum, pondering the City’s stake and role in the pending divorce.” (click for complete essay)

(1) Published on the occasion of the exhibition Technocomplex at Parrotta Contemporary Art, Stuttgart.

De Beers

The Economist

London Stock Exchange

Technocomplex

[…] The third body of work in the show Technokomplex, 2017, which lends its title to the exhibition, is also informed by Madejska’s research into the City of London. On her ex- ploration Madejska witnessed the Square Mile’s corporate occupants celebrating them- selves through ever larger, sleeker and increasingly opulent representative architectural en- deavours; capital ventures that devour anything that may stand in their way and that have little or no concerns for the needs and concerns of the citizens affected by them.

One of these representative architectures, 20 Fenchurch Street, or as nicknamed by the people of London the ‘Walkie Talkie’, had a particularly severe impact on its surround- ings. The building is characterized by its unique concave curvature, a feature that had the calamitous side effect of reflecting intense sunlight, sending a heat-ray onto the pavement of the street below and melting parts of a parked car. This physical relationship between the architecture, the sunlight and the surrounding environment prompted Madejska to synthesize her photographic explorations into sculptural form. The complex has, akin to the fossil stitchings, an untimely quality that is both prehistoric and of the now. Through the unique combination of photographic paper and poured pewter, Madejska transfers the light-sensitive resin coating of the photographic paper onto a sculptural object. The two elements unite in the hardening process, leaving the light-sensitive resin removed from the paper and melted into the poured pewter surface. The chemical reaction be- tween the pewter and the photographic paper results in a surface structure that resem- bles enamel or metal work and yet the photo sensitivity of the resin proceeds in a grad- ual darkening of the object’s surface until the exposure is completed. Not unlike an al- chemist, Madejska’s marriage of elements is a search for purification. Her use of metal in the photographic process reaches back to the early days of photography when metal plates were still customary. Technocomplex is resultantly revisiting the origins of photo- graphy in an age where its physical properties are about to become extinct. Madejska allows the resulting piece a life of its own, noble, immortal, fossilized. Removed from the image or the notion of a source her process is a form of deconstruction that separates the image from its carrier leaving us with an object instead of an image. The material eats itself. A process of emancipation has begun.

Ouroboros, the self-consuming dragon may very well be the underlying symbol of this constellation of works. The Square Mile with its boundary mark dragons, who in its greed and struggle for self protection and exclusion consumes itself, is united with pho- tography, a field based on the transformation of light into the representation of an im- age, here liberated from that task through the re-imagination of the original process de- void of its duty to depict. As symbol for alchemy, Ourobouros represents both this strive for gold and the perfection of a process through self-referentiality—making itself the prima materia. […] 

by Anna Gritz, Ballsy (2017)

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Near Here, Not Here, Come Here, Over Here, Right Here, Here We Are

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From Now On (Folly)

Factum

[…]  It is also worth noting that Madejska with her practice can hardly be classified as a single-medium artist, even if photography suits her well. In one of her letters to Johanna Jaeger, she talks about how painting was her earlier experience; she discovered photography for herself only during her studies in Essen, and it is the medium’s imperfection that captivates her. The crevices hat she seeks to explore in her work originate precisely in the dubious perfection of the match between the intention to capture something and the actual representation. The difference between the initial condition and the final outcome feeds the artist’s sceptical attitude, divesting the medium itself of finality, of the power to name and indicate. Those are but approximations and modalities.

The first full embodiment of this approach is the work Factum (2014), consisting of sixteen small tables with abstract, almost stereographic images printed on layers of plexiglass. These hybrids, combining photography, installation, and sculpture, are a study of the extraordinary space that is the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park, Berlin. Its uniqueness consists in preserving in stone the mirror image that comprises the layout. The central area of the memorial is lined symmetrically on both sides by sixteen sarcophagi holding the ashes of Soviet soldiers killed in the Battle of Berlin. The sarcophagi are decorated with relief carvings of military scenes and quotations from Joseph Stalin; they can be considered as screens, or stage sets, very clearly indicating the intended viewing points. On one side, the quotations are in the original Russian; opposite are their German translations. […]

by Jakub Śwircz, November 2019

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Temporary or Permanent

In 2010, the Folkwang Museum opened its new building designed by David Chipperfield Architects which was awarded the NRW Architecture Prize. The building complex, erected in just 23 months, is an extraordinary architectural and technical achievement, which is documented and explained in the publication Museum Folkwang. Die Architektur, for the first time with texts and images, drafts by the architects and photographic essays. The contributions are devoted to the prehistory of the project, the design features of David Chipperfield’s design and the relationship between architecture and museums in general.

Here Agata Madejska’s photo essay Temporary or Permanent explores the building and its structural environment.

With texts by David Chipperfield, Bruno Haas, Wolfgang Pehnt and others.

Other photo essays by Stephanie Kiwitt and Marion Poussier.

further info

The Order of Solids

[…] In The Order of Solids we see various public monuments, plazas, and sculptures. Unusual perspectives, changes in size ratio, and the precise translation of daylight into the light of photography gives them an aesthetic, alien quality; their concrete, solid materiality is dissolved into light and dark shapes that hover between stark abstraction and realistic representation. In a pictorial sense, Madejska knocks the monuments off their pedestals by presenting these as voids. Her photographic redistribution of the visible and invisible addresses the transitive character of symbolic representations in public space that prevail or pass on. She uses photography as an image-generating medium whose products are rooted in visible reality. The creation of this reference, however, takes from the representation any necessity to remain true to reality; rather, it is a symbolic reference to space. In an engagement with the physical space and the camera’s possibilities of representing it, Madejska creates subjectively charged images of space that visualize the production of space through its form and imagination. […]

by Kathrin Meyer, Of Places and Spaces: Mirages and other Manifestations of Reality

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[…] A withdrawal of color is apparent in all Agata Madejska’s works, including the latest series The Order of Solids, which she began in 2010. Once again, Madejska demarcates her motifs – monuments, sculptures and fountains – from their environment. In the abstraction of the representation, it is sometimes the case that the objects from the public space that dominate the picture can only be deciphered by means oft he thin boarder, showing buildings and trees. Madejska is interested in their function as foils for a cultural context and can be seen as a powerful and at the same time abstracting exploration of history / the story and its representation. Moreover, The Order of Solids illustrates Madejska’s interest and focus sculpture, three-dimensionality and her understanding of photography as the starting and not the end point of her artist work. In presenting her images she always seeks to sculpturally expand her image space. It is irrelevant whether, as in the latest development of her works, there are actually objects in the space or whether this specific interest in space is expressed in the framing of the pictures. The precision of her working method is evident in her entire oeuvre – in the motivic stringency and her control of the print, form of presentation and installation. […]

by Lisa Marei Schmidt, click for full text 

Ideogram

[…] In the series Ideogram (2007–2009) we find white instead of black, tones of gray, a milky absence of color. This series also consists of eight photographs 60 cm high and between 44 and 49 cm wide, depending on the motif. In Ideogram 001 (2008, 60×46 cm), the sharp edge of two curved grid-like surfaces meets in the middle, protruding towards the viewer. The edges are soft on the gray-white sur- face; it seems as though the form were emerging from fog or clouds—the ground cannot be seen. Ideogram 003 (2009, 60×43 cm) is a clearly delineated frontal block, while Ideogram 004 (60×45,5 cm) transforms a convex structure into a surface, a shimmering excerpt on a monochromatic background. These are photographs of office blocks of glass and steel; their ghostly appearance is due to their removal from the city context, the unreal white, and the arrangement. Not a sign of life can be seen, and there is no indication as to whether people have ever been present here, have ever lived or worked in the buildings. Madejska presents them as abstract struc- tures, as grid orders that are either pictorially flat or create a spatial effect—less as real buildings with a spatial or temporal location than as forms. It’s about creating images in which the buildings become ghosts.[…]

by Kathrin Meyer, Of Places and Spaces: Mirages and other Manifestations of Reality

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[…] In the Ideogram series, a sharp geometric form, constituting part of a glass office block, pierces through a cloudy, unspecified space. This building is detached, isolated. It does not belong to any surroundings that are familiar to us. From experience we recognise that such forms of modern architecture serve business purposes and can be found in modern neighbourhoods and business centres. Buildings of this nature rarely stand alone. The isolated singular entity therefore loses its primary purpose and is detached from its social and functional role. Through selecting and detaching the object, Madejska returns the building to its former design stage. It becomes an idea, a sign. It is a mirage from the past. In other words, it constitutes the designer’s materialised, concrete idea.[…]

by Dobromiła Błaszczyk, founder and director of London-based arts organisation Contemporary Lynx, since 2013

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kosmos

by Kathrin Meyer, Of Places and Spaces: Mirages and other Manifestations of Reality

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[…] For a brief moment the spark throws light on forms and objects, which until then remain hidden in the dark. Photographs by Agata Madejska, which belong to the kosmos series depict the unique moment when our eyes make out subtly illuminated shapes amid the dark abyss of oblivion and neglect. At first these shapes are abstract; they resemble nothing meaningful. But as time passes, they form into numerous pictures – shapes of swings, slides, and playgrounds – familiar motifs of childhood memories. The artist draws from widely familiar concepts embedded within historical, social and cultural memory. She relies upon the associations these concepts evoke, thereby triggering our memory, forgetfulness, and things that are conscious and subconscious within us. […]

by Dobromiła Błaszczyk, founder and director of London-based arts organisation Contemporary Lynx, since 2013

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