“SHAPE OF BEAUTY”
Exhibition by Joanna Sokolowska
Sculptures: bisque fired clay
Paintings: oil on canvas
Boston, 2014-2015
So fragile. So uncertain. So often missing parts. Cracked inside. Incomplete.
This is human existence.
Sometimes it brings joy, sometimes tears and pain. However, it is our ability to experience emotions, even the most difficult ones, that makes us so beautifully human. We feel, therefore we are.
The exhibition “Shape of Beauty” is my attempt to turn attention to this contrast, the nature of our existence: painful, but beautiful. It exposes our vulnerability, our lack of perfection, our limitations. Once reflected, must be pondered… Voids and mystery become the necessary conditions of our lives.
Colorless clay sculptures refer to the rawness of emotions, the rawness of our bodies. The cracks, openings, and hollow shapes refer to psychological states of mind, results of this incompleteness. All the color belongs to the paintings, which maintain the tones of the flesh – often wounded – but this suffering hides an unexpressed beauty.
The title of the exhibition comes from the fragment of the poem “A Thing Of Beauty (Endymion)” by John Keats.
John Keats “A Thing Of Beauty (Endymion)”
“… Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkn’d ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits…”
