In “White Drops”, curator Regina Fiorito combines the work of Seth Price and Tobias Pils with that of the influential Polish textile artist Barbara Levittoux-Świderska (1933-2019) to evoke the possibility of finding solace in the ambient disorientation in the enigmatic fragment.
The exhibition is titled after Białe krople (White Drops, 1997), a monumental wall sculpture that Levittoux-Świderska made with strips of aluminum foil resembling used, shredded grocery bags held together by a grid of transparent fishing line. Like an old wedding dress taken from the clothes racks of a flea market, it is both ethereal and abject, an object with marvelous potential housed in the rubbish register.
In front of Białe kroplelarge Pils table Untitled (bf candles), 2014-15, projects a similar double effect. A rectangular void in the center of the canvas is framed by a jumble of abstract marks that could be read as talons, threads or corsets. Pils girds this structure with stripes of thick white paint that signal both band-aid solutions and instances of authoritarianism, as if the municipality found an offensive message and demanded censorship.
Seth Price Untitled, 2008, is a sheet of high impact polystyrene printed with a vacuum-formed breast and the year the work was made. The rounded chest floats off-center on the lower half of the large piece of plastic, an organ without a body. Fiorito describes the soft form as a ghost, but I can feel the skin around my own nipples responding to it. I have always been drawn to the honest admission of alienation.
