Silvia Krupinska and Family Portrait, 2006.
"Despite the human hand
being so
prevalent
in this work,
one could
almost believe that they
are able to
change form independently."
That Silvia Krupinska is able to approach the making of her sculptures with the attitude of openness that she does is attributable to her belief that art should be, and for her is, fun. Her works are often fashioned from modest materials such as wood, metal, and concrete, as well as some more commonly associated with crafts and play — chicken wire and plasticine. Krupinska’s works are highly coloured and display the tactility and plasticity of their production through their final form and texture. However, the artist’s obvious enjoyment of the materials does not diminish the work’s impact, and an unselfconscious undercurrent of strangeness lends them a subversive quality.
Krupinska began her artistic career as a painter and some early concerns are still present — her decision-making regarding colour in her work is especially painterly. She moved towards working in three dimensions with an intermediary stage of dissecting her paintings and displaying the pieces as installations. Her sculptures to date have ranged in scale, from Family Portrait, 2006, measuring 1.8 metres in height, to Meduza, 2007, at 29 cm in width. They have been variously displayed wall-mounted, free-standing, indoors and out.
Although clearly abstract and a product of the artists’ instinct, the forms echo real entities in the world. Krupinska was born in Northern Slovakia and lived amongst the High Tatras, a mountain range on the Polish border, until she moved to England at eighteen. The work clearly references this geography.
The cumbersome forms have an uncomfortable presence in the room, as they seem to posses a level of autocracy. Though they speak clearly of their own physicality and materiality, when encountering them, there is a sense that one has just missed out on witnessing their manifestation, and that their status of full and real existence in the world has only been very recently established. There is something of the supernatural or alien about them, a feeling that they are encroaching. Simultaneously appearing both transient and weighty, their ambiguity only adds to their weirdness. Despite the human hand being so prevalent in this work, one could almost believe that they are able to change form independently.
One of the strongest aspects of these works is their obvious medical connotations, owing to the cell-like appearance of the sculptures and the clinical nature of the tiles. They seem to reference disease — the sense of their spontaneous, independent growth, along with their threatening presence, speak clearly of the malign and the cancerous. The forms also contain ideas about the medical or scientific experiment, and intrusion into the domestic or bodily space.
Charlotte Bint