The main strand of Xawery Wolski’s work focuses on unraveling the capacity of matter to withstand the passage of time. Through his artworks the artist creates traces of such resistance – the imprints of what has managed to survive. He gives them the status of relics through which he faces disappearance, vivisection and evanescence. And this confrontation is the main aim of mate- rial poetics which he develops in his art.

Xawery Wolski’s exhibition at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko is a cross-sectional review of his work. Out of his vast oeuvre, we have selected works whose starting point is the body and matter. The relationship between these two elements produces various figures.

At the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, the leading stand is the body in various configurations as a trace imprinted in matter, a figure materialized in sculpture, a tool for forming material, as well as a source of forms, images or reflections. At the Orangery, the emphasis is shifted onto the properties of materials and the capacity for forming them into metaphors. What provides a counterpoint for this poetics is the work exhibited in front of the gallery its sense emerges from the direct impact of the material and the form.