The project comprises four parts, two of which designate an earlier period of the artist’s work, dominated by drawing and figurative sculpture. These are works from 2006–2007 – a wax hare figure whose dimensions and shape resemble the human figure, and drawings with animal – hare and sheep – motifs. The artist refers to this period of her work as a move away from installation art towards speaking about the outside world through realistic forms. The animals (and sometimes human-animal hybrids) from Jagiełło’s personal bestiary have become signs of an alphabet, tools for communicating with other people, for playing with the viewer, or a narrative element. As the artist herself puts it, ‘I am interested in what is primal in man, in what he is moving away from as civilisation develops. Through drawing (a simple, primal gesture) I investigate the tensions between the animal/natural and the cultural in man’. Jagiełło’s drawing method is of an almost meditative character.
The artist’s most recent projects were inspired by, among other things, the events in crisis-stricken Madrid — street protests that have become an example to follow for citizens disillusioned with the present socio-economic order elsewhere in the world.
Another important theme present in these works is a search for the beast, or bestial, in urban space. The Contact with Nature drawing-and-photography series began with photographs taken in the public space of Madrid, a city ‘immersed in crisis, damaged by riots, irritated by the stalemate’, as the artist puts it. Images of street marches or protesters’ clashes with the police alternate with snapshot representations of animals, real and imaginary.
A multimedia collage displayed in the gallery’s underground part presents scenes from the wave of Madrid’s Indignados marches and riots. Interestingly, images of the anti-austerity protests coexist here with those from a recent march on behalf of expanding the rights of the city’s household pets. Someone could interpret the composition as a proof of the complexity of the modern world, someone else would describe it in terms of the growing artificialisation of the man-animal relationship, whereas a third person might address it in the more general terms of building tension between the inner animal and the one outside (which establishes a link with the artist’s earlier projects).
The ‘beast’ in the title is a broad-ranging term. For Izabella Jagiełło it means not only the wild element in human nature, but also the complex, and sometimes dangerous, organism that is the city.
The artist notes that bestial in Spanish means ‘unaware’, ‘brutish’. According to her, the show is a story about the ‘degeneration of the world, about sick relations and the primacy of economic thinking, all resulting from our detachment from nature’.
Izabella Jagiełło, born 1973 in Warsaw. Studied at the Faculty of Sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (diploma 1998 under Grzegorz Kowalski). Fellowships in UK (Sheffield Hallam University) and Mexico (Universidad Veracruzana). She has been living in Spain for 12 years.
