Krystyna Borkowska
“Playing with Space and Time”
About Memories, Architecture, New York, and How to Slow Time
Interview and text by Monika Hankova
Krystyna Borkowska is a New York-based artist born in Warsaw, Poland. She’s been exhibiting in numerous galleries internationally. Recently, she was part of Integral: Parts That Together Constitute a Whole and MINIMAL | MAXIMAL – The Principle of Convergence at Lichtundfire Gallery in Lower East Side. Her solo show Arches and Other Curves is on view at Hudson Guild Gallery II in Chelsea until November 13, 2024. This “subtle, dynamic installation refers to urban space where glimpses of architectural details trigger memory of other places. The past lingers, coexist, and is eternally interconnected with tangible city structures.”
How would you introduce yourself in regard to your current activities in the arts?
I’m a visual artist. My work is a form of reductive paintings, usually on box-like thick stretchers, sometimes on wood panels. Very often I use grit, repetition, or two different shapes, or even three combined together. I am intrigued and inspired by the energy of a found object, not just the shape which usually is really intriguing, but it’s also a certain angle that for example keeps repeating itself of certain cut.
You mostly work with wooden pieces. How would you describe wood as a material and how you work with it?
I have an ongoing series of work that is more sculptural. It’s called Architectural Fetishes. These are based on a found element like piece of wood that I pick up. It could be an architectural fragment, or a fragment of some construction, and sometimes driftwood. I use this as a base to which I replicate or add a shape of canvas. Additional to acrylic paint I use all kinds of metal leaves: silver, aluminum, and copper. Generally, that is the base and sometimes there are combinations of these. Each of these metals age differently. When you apply silver and aluminum next to each other, they generally look the same, but with time silver will tarnish and aluminum won’t. If I scratch the surface and there are parts that come through, then if it is silver, it will go darker gradually. And then, at certain point, I may seal it, which radically slows the process, but it never totally stops it. Silver gets dark and the parts that are light will kind of pierce through more prominently. Or I add aluminum on the piece of canvas next to it, and then that stays fixed and that wood with the silver keeps on changing. It’s like alive versus fixed.
It’s play with time. So that’s why I say it’s wood, canvas, acrylic, metal leaves, and time. Not all the pieces use this time element, but especially those Architectural Fetishes are based on that.
When I started picking up these elements, I found that certain wood was extremely heavy and that there was practically no gap between the lines and that made the density because that was old wood in the environment that is not pre-planned. For example, Christmas trees grow fast as they expand fast, and the gaps between those rings are relatively big. So, the wood density is much lighter, much thinner, much less dense and therefore lighter. There’s so much that you find out only by dealing with found objects that you just have to be almost like a detective.
How was your path to this type of artwork? Has it developed somehow when you came to New York first?
I was in London when I first started doing the reductive painting. But actually, the Architectural Fetishes started from my first trip to New York, which was back in 1985. I found this piece and it was my first piece of wood I picked up.
Was it just an accident of being so intrigued by that piece of wood that you wanted to take it with you and use it for your purpose?
I took it and I knew that I wanted to incorporate it into my work. But generally what bonds this and my beginnings of using metal leaf is time. It’s space and time. And that’s the leitmotif of my whole thinking, which I only later realized so clearly. I was growing up to understand what I was doing, what was directing me. So again, it’s space and time. And that’s why for example my latest installation is not about the singular pieces. Of course they can exist later in another space as somebody may respond to a particular piece and take it to a completely different environment. When somebody is getting my piece, then I like to help them to install it in their space, which is extremely important because you can kill it or you can make it. And also because they often are diptychs or triptychs or even certain repetition of work.
You also may have a different configuration. Like this yellow piece that is set on the front wall at my current show. It’s architecturally present. You feel the time imprinted onto it, like the time was in it. So, those pieces are movable according to the space they occupy. The biggest part of it is installing and reacting to space, and it also involves time because you have to move around and feel that from each direction.
Talking about time, do you somehow reflect your past in your work? Does your your Polish heritage play a role in it?
I think there is something to it because my life really is Poland, London – I spent equal amount of times in those places – and now the longest time I’m here in New York. If we are in a certain environment, we respond to it whether we realize it or not. We respond to the structure of the space, to the architecture of the place where we live. In Poland, a lot of places were totally built from scratch. It was fast, functional, grid-oriented, quite unattractive visually. Nevertheless, those structures must have penetrated me. Also, there were sometimes remnants of older buildings, so there was this kind of disharmony. However, one thing affected the other. In England, there was a very different dynamic, there were quite boring rows of living houses, and also a lot of older buildings were destroyed in the war. Everything was very close to the ground. This was a completely different imprint. Then, when I arrived to New York with my husband, I remember, we just got out next to the Empire State Building, and we started laughing because we were so amazed by the scale. I always saw it as those man-made canyons, and we were in those canyons, in these man-made mountains of buildings, and we saw the beauty of it.
How has the move to New York changed your perception and how it all reflected in your own work?
I only started making the reductive paintings in London, not so long before I moved to New York, but at that time even if it was a triptych or four pieces, these were still of a scale of London. It had a different scale, it had more concentration of an actual piece. I used metallic pigment, which I would blow into the front of the painting.
Then I went into using metal leaf – this is more or less the time of the transition to New York – and the scale also moved. They were more monumental in their composition, and I realized that I don’t use them as paintings that should be hung on the wall. Before I had an exhibition of mirrors in one gallery, and I more or less hung them just like paintings. And then, when the different scale developed, I started to think more about the space and positioning in the space.
What was, in fact, the idea behind your current solo show Arches and Other Curves?
I was always interested in space and not only in illustrating space, but actually playing with it. I’ve been always interested in the multidimensional physics in hyperspace. Each show I had was completely different show, even though it used the same elements.
In this show, I wanted to generally put the idea of artisan curves and other curves. I wanted to create a situation when you are responding to architecture and what is in your memory. How you are imprinting your memory onto it. The way you see a detail, light reflection, or color being changed by sunset and throwing certain reflections… I think that those architectural situations that were there before are coexisting with the current. That memory is still a valid energy.
It is about perception and energy between you and space. If you are in the right frame of mind, open and perceptive, then you lose sense of what is real, what triggers what, and one informs the other. You are in the light, you are in that kind of platform, a little bit aside of your human form in the sense of not enclosing them, but you are kind of connecting to this.
And how does energy and memory of this ever-changing city reflect in your work?
When I came to Chelsea 26 years ago, all these new buildings on the West Side didn’t exist. There were all these post-industrial buildings, docks and factories. I saw the speed of changes and how quickly they were disappearing and how much I imprint my own memories of this neighborhood before and my own history of the architecture. How all of it is not fixed, how it’s totally ever-changing. And this is something opposite to what I used to think of architecture: when the building is there, it is there to stay. And all of a sudden, that just changed. And then, 9/11 happened; just after the WTC was hit I was right next to it. That sense of solidity of architecture was all of a sudden put in question.
How did you feel about this city and its architecture during the pandemic when the streets were empty?
It was quite magic actually. I remember I went to my studio, I was at the corner of Broadway and Prince, and I looked around and there was not a person in the street. It’s just impossible to imagine it now. And the beauty of architecture was just standing out. It was just like the light. It was a dream. This majestic city was still there. It was the atmosphere of architecture and memories. Like the Chirico paintings. This emptiness and the beauty of its stability, of its light and the shadows. It was just a pure form.
Is there a place you would recommend to readers of ZONE NY that is your favorite part of town where you go to feel energized?
I would go all the way downtown to Wall Street area on weekend when there is nobody there. The buildings sit, it’s just beautiful. And then you see this crown of the building, shining because the sun hits you. It has all these old New York buildings, but also it has Frank Gehry, this needle standing there with this kind of quicksilver going on. The other recommendation is to walk on the High Line. The fact that you are suspended and you see things. It’s almost like a back door of New York. And you see all these fantastic buildings newly built by famous architects. Each one is like a pearl hanging over all this. And this kind of gutter underneath it, like a car wash or so. Of course, there is a lot of old New York on the West Side. I think, if you go with the right frame of mind and open eyes in downtown Wall Street area on weekend, that is something that could reorganize your sense of space and architecture. It’s like being in the right place at the right time, looking with a fresh eye, and not being distracted with busy life on the street.
The topic of this issue of ZONE NY is “gift.” I wonder what was the most wonderful gift you’ve ever received or you would like to receive in the future?
Big, empty space with irregular shape that would really be a gift to myself. First, to be in an empty space and slowly work with that space. The walls would be irregular, but they would put sense into this irregularity, a certain order. Sometimes, even in the studio when I was preparing for this show and just planning and putting two pieces together, something sits between those two or three pieces, which means that the space is organized, but dynamic.
It’s like a constellation. Sometimes we see a fragment, and we sense part of a structure. We see a glimpse, yet we can kind of sense the whole. It’s like a multidimensionality. Our senses are limitless if you put these together: memory, intuition, space sensitivity, volume, shape, light, and time. All these are penetrating the reality and we respond to it.