Window shopper
27 July – 20 August 2023
Suwon Lee
Małgorzata Widomska
Curated by Elaine ML Tam & Death of Man
Kravitz Contemporary x Death of Man are pleased to present Window shopper, a two-person exhibition featuring works by Venezuelan-Korean photographer Suwon Lee and Polish painter Małgorzata Widomska, curated by Elaine ML Tam. The exhibition takes its title from a suite of formal qualities the artworks share – namely the recurrence of the window as a literal and metaphorical device that shapes the virtual act of seeing. Drawing together photography and abstract painting for their respective abilities to speak to personal-cultural memory through the retinal pleasure of specific chromatic fields, Window shopper calls to attention the situatedness of the viewer of art. In so doing, the exhibition explores the parsimony of the frame edge, the aesthetic logic of transparency and the role of passionate detachment in memory.
The experience of the window shopper is not jubilation in the strictest sense. Sure enough, there is sustained beguilement about that which is beyond the window: a world of appearances hemmed in by a transparent threshold.
Suwon Lee
Lights On, 2011
Pigmented Inkjet Print
Edition of 5
52.5 x 70 cm
Suwon Lee
Purple Haze, 2011
Pigmented Inkjet Print
Edition of 5
52.5 x 70 cm
For above all, the window separates looking from possession and there- upon dramatizes longing. An ouroboric desire here affirms and re-affirms itself; it is precisely the not-having that creates wanting anew. Such is the trial and delight of the window shopper – to entertain this irrational form of thwarted desire through seemingly benign enjoyment. That people smash glass in protestation is no accidental gesture, it disrupts the harmony of illusion and is thus the perfected sign of the disillusioned.
Suwon Lee
Purple Haze, 2011
Pigmented Inkjet Print
Edition of 5
52.5 x 70 cm
Małgorzata Widomska
The Rain, 2022
Mixed Media
40 x 30 cm
Window shopper draws together photography and abstract painting for their respective abilities to speak to the personal-cultural through retinal pleasure. In casting the viewer of art as a window shopper, the exhibition calls to attention both their situatedness and condition of passionate detachment.
Through Lee’s viewfinder we are provided with alternative views onto South American cities which she refers to as ‘anti-clichés’. Cradled by their horizon lines are vast urban sprawls peopled by light, a sense of immensity in relief that cedes none of its power to genericism.
For these depictions are a bid for life against the reduction of these locations to their touristic landmarks, or flattening by their ranking status as ‘the most dangerous city in the world’.
Małgorzata Widomska
Fathers Room, 2022
Oil on canvas
190 x 190 cm
In Widomska’s work, the canvas stretcher is sometimes echoed in the composition of a painting – a window seems as if it tunnels through the canvas, behaving as a portal into remote, intimate memories. Adumbrate quadrangles offer a resting place for primary experience, a snapshot of a moment wherein specific personages, events or places find expression in abstract form. Within their parsimonious palettes, only the soft intrusion of a sputtered detail – a broad scraping stroke or fortified splash – draw the viewer back to the surface for a breath.
Małgorzata Widomska
The Rain, 2022
Mixed Media
40 x 30 cm
The world of appearances shrinks like clingfilm, the window’s edges crispate in a fast withdrawal. After all is lost, it is the impression registered in light or paint that will remain with bullish insistence. The foreclosure of memory to a distinct but melodramatic hue, protects us from what cannot be apprehended in full, the overwhelming richness of experience that is perhaps best handed over to beauty. While impressions made by the work of art are logged in the annals of time, our listless window gazer finally retires, their place taken by the next shopper of shiny, dissolute fantasies.
