Natasza Niedziółka

born 1978 in Międzyrzecz, Poland

lives and works in Berlin

Calm sea, no wind. The threads and the embroidery give me the way to deepen the abstraction. Not only a picture, not just the beauty of an image or an experience of a structure, let’s say a humble and honest approach, an expression of my worldview. ”

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She studied painting with Tal R at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany.

For almost ten years now, Niedziółka has primarily been working with embroidery thread that she applies to the stretched canvas. The canvas functions as a support manufactured by a machine that has a regular horizontal and vertical structure on which the irregular manual work of embroidery can be seen. This therefore reveals the qualities of both materials. In their visual appearance, these works oscillate between textile picture and tapestry. The hatching – in the sense of stitches made close together, most often in a vertical row – is perhaps the most characteristic aspect of these works in which threads are woven into the canvas in a flat chromatic gradation.

In their materiality and treatment of color, Niedziółka’s works strive toward immediate sensations: They want to be beheld, for it is only when beholders move in front of the picture that the threads can unfold their entire chromatic spectrum. Seen from the front or from the side, these stitches appear either as separate units or as one dense color field. What appears flat is sometimes revealed to be a loop extending out from the surface; and we can discern how parts of the canvas have been treated with a pigment pen or with ink and wax when we look very closely and recognize their different textures.

These works may therefore explicitly present themselves as pictures, yet their materiality deviates from that of conventional pictures. There is a temporal aspect to be found in the meditative time spent making each work, and there is a chromatic aspect – a curious shimmering of colors that is activated when we move around while looking at the work. And then there is the aspect of the pictures’ appearance, which we can only identify at second glance as embroidered compositions that are non-representational but are always charged with multifaceted associations.

—

Vanessa Joan Müller

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Niedziółka’s works will be on display at the Kabinett sector at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2022. The gallery presented the artist’s first solo exhibition at the LOGIN in 2021.

In 2020 Niedziółka received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and she was an artist in residence at the Gyeongju Art Centre in South Korea in 2018.