Wrota (Drzwi) | Gates (Door)

Małgorzata Turewicz Lafranchi was born in Szczecin in 1961 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and at the University of Philosophy in Dornach, Switzerland. She has lived and worked in Bellinzona, Switzerland, since 1994. Since the early 1990s, Turewicz Lafranchi's main means of artistic expression have been sculptures and objects. Their minimalist and ascetic form is accompanied by an emotional and often very personal message. The work on display, acquired for the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin in 2019, is no different. In the author's commentary accompanying the work, the artist reveals the biographical context of its creation. Gates was her first work completed after the death of her husband and is dedicated to him. His sudden passing, as the artist explains, came as a great shock, and working on Gates was a way of expressing her desire to make contact with him, but also with other loved ones who have died and who may exist in another dimension, inaccessible to us. The artist used copper-plated steel wire, which is used in the construction industry for reinforced concrete to create very strong, impenetrable structures. As he writes, the material appeared in Gates because its specificity made it possible to capture the opposites of permeability, flow, on the one hand, and impenetrability, lack of contact, cut-off, on the other. The structure of the object suggests the possibility of penetration between the tightly arranged wires, while at the same time structurally preventing it. Gates are also associated with the gates of heaven or hell, and thus with crossing the threshold of the familiar and entering another reality. They describe the liminal in its purest form - crossing the boundary between life and death. Magdalena Lewoc