3-A Gallery, CICA Museum
August 27 – 31, 2025
2025.8.27 – 31
The Hardest Softness
The works presented in the exhibition, dating from 2021-2025, constitute a kind of visual puzzle the artist uses to connect with her audience through her experience. The exhibition space offers a narrative about the limits of sadness, love, and the passion associated with them. About the sweet weight that must crush us to our limits, only to experience surrender and the ensuing bliss, the infinite softness of the body.
There’s no single way, no single path, to talk about sadness or love. These are universal feelings, often trivialized, yet experienced in profoundly individual ways. When they coalesce in a single experience, we find ourselves on the brink of tragedy, a brink beyond which nothing will ever be the same again. The forces of sadness and love are similar—both overwhelm, completely subjugate, and allow us to do beautiful or terrifying things. Through them, we become different, reaching the limits of self-control we’ve never known before. Both also come uninvited.
Martyna Jastrzębska (she/her) b.1987, based in Poland is a visual artist, postfeminist and lecturer. She creates multimedia installations and objects. In her artistic practice, she intertwines the threads of the passing of time, change, rebirth, reinterpretation of the meaning of a trace, and the deconstruction of myths and symbols. She is a Scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage in Poland. In 2022 she received a Scholarship for Outstanding Young Polish Scientists in the field of fine arts and art conservation. In 2022 she was a Polish nominee in Baltic Horizons project – an international sculpture competition, which brings together artists and communities in the Baltic Sea basin. Her works are included in private collections, the Collection for the New Century of PKO Bank Polski, and the Contemporary Art Collection of the National Museum in Gdansk.
