Simo Bacar is delighted to present Tubamirum; A Missive for the Daffodils, ML Poznanski’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Perhaps someone working in the gallery will be kind enough to lift one of ML Poznanski’s paintings from the wall and show you its verso. Viewed this way you will see that bits of off-cut linen picked from the floor of her Warsaw studio, a place where she makes clothes as well as paintings, have been gathered, hand-dyed, and painstakingly sewn together to form a canvas. This approach reflects one of the founding ideas of the paintings in this exhibition: that things broken down or partially used up by one process (making clothes), should be repurposed for another (making a painting), and that the result should be a new creative starting point – a ‘blank canvas’, as people say.
While this aspect of the work points our attention to the idea of painting as a site of construction or building, the figures and scenes depicted on these carefully fabricated canvases seem to capture moments of figurative breakdown or dissolution. Poznanski’s vaporous facture exploits the visual qualities of watered down or lightly handled paint applied to an absorbent textile surface to capture human beings as partial, hazy, or incomplete apparitions. Lost within gossamer films of milky tempera; submerged in cloudy fields of dank green oil paint; or blacked out entirely, like shadows, the willowy bodies we encounter in these paintings seem reluctant or unable to be fully present for us. In this way, Poznanski’s paintings can be understood as insular, deeply personal things: private exercises in committing air-thin memories to fabric.

– Paul Pieroni

ML Poznanski (b.1984, Hull) is an artist based in Warsaw and London. She studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Poznanski is part of the collective Everyone Agrees who have published The Night & After The Night released by Book Works. She has performed at Raven Row as a guest for Resonance FM and has been featured in group exhibitions including at SPACE, London; Castillo/Corrales, Paris; Fool’s Prophecy, Warsaw. Most recently, she has exhibited a selection of works in Zeit, House of Spouse, Vienna.