Natalia Brandt

Natalia Brandt  studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ponań, diploma in drawing and painting in 2009.  She runs  X Drawing Studio at the University of Arts in Poznań. She is author of paintings, drawings, objects, photographs, installations, videos, and artist’s books. 

Natalia Brandt used to work in cycles, working through a certain topics in a series of paintings, drawings or collages. In the series of assemblage compositions titled ‘Belated Conversations with Kurt Schwitter’ (2010-2012) she alludes to the currently dominant interpretations of works of the Avant-Garde classics. The time-deferred interviews with the champion of Dada absurdism were an expression of her fascination with his ‘art of fragments’.

Her series of paintings called ‘Blinding’ (2013-2016) relates to memory, to the way we remember things and what images do to our memory. Photographic prints, attached to the canvas, are covered with painted patterns, covering the photographic depictions of destruction, suffering, cruelty.  By covering these depictions, she prevents the gaze from falling into the trap of an image, from letting it be guided by its rhetoric and memory.

In the series ‘Latent Relations of Things’ (2017-2019), in surprising configurations of references, a tangle of forms, shapes, and words of sly, tongue-in-cheek, commentary, the artist constructs a kind of „visual aphorisms.” In several dozen colour collages, she used old books, magazines, engravings, illustrations, documents, and various objects. Combining seemingly incompatible contents, she produces aphoristic representations, replete with sense of humor and ulterior references to art history, modernist canons, avant-garde styles, or cultural myths and discourses.

In multi-element installations she refers to contemporary utopias. In a project named ‘Patriots of All Countries, Unit!’ (2009) she  referred in subversive way to the utopia of transnational patriotism. In a photography-and-sound installation called ‘Closed Circuit’ (2012) she questioned the practices of social reformers. In the installation 'Exterritorial Line' (2020-2022) she is looking at the utopia of blurring the borders.