ALICJA GASKON
works | about | cv 

Alicja Gaskon, born 1985 in Warsaw, Poland. In 2010, she received her Masters of Fine Arts from the Department of Painting (Specialization: murals, sculpture, animation), at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. Gaskon has been exhibited widely in numerous solo and group shows in Switzerland and Poland. In addition to multiple awards and scholarships, she has shown with Gallery Le Guern in multiple prestigious international art fairs, including Artissima, Frieze and Viennafair.  Gaskon had two solo shows with balzer projects,  in 2015 and 2016. She lives and works in New York and Warsaw.
 
“My primary media are painting, installation, video, and drawing. Film is always complementary to the drawings and it usually shares the same title. I work in series, and projects. The main source of my inspiration is always an idea. As the Polish-born chemist Marie Curie once said: “Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.” My paintings are often geometric and abstract, and almost never representational. I consider art a form of a thought. Ideas are put in form of objects, that can be seen and touched, but there is always something beyond that. They often exist to intrigue, provoke, or confuse. They are fleeting as shadows despite their physical reality; they operate between metaphor and open narration.” (Alicja Gaskon about her work, January 2015)
 
Gaskon’s art takes place between different media and explores spaces of transition and indecision. Her work is often suspended between abstraction and representation, form and formlessness, ideas and their material manifestations. Actual city spaces change into abstract and colorful formations, artworks interact and engage with the exhibition space, paintings are complemented with sound, opening up questions of relations between different media, art and space, ideas and their emergence in specific media. In exploring these borders, Gaskon hints at the possibilities of art as much as at its impossibilities, at what happens and gets lost in the process of artistic production.
 
Her strategy is often one of reduction. Frequently using simple forms such as a line or a square, Gaskon grapples with the most basic tools of artistic creation, exploring their limits as forms of expression.
 
For Gaskon, creation and destruction as well as invention and subversion take place simultaneously. In her series Unfolded for instance, Gaskon combines different techniques and materials (collage, print, drawing; enamel, gesso, aluminum, wood, lacquer, glue) to explore the conceptual and spacial limits of the picture frame and art. By destroying and undermining its conventional understandings and uses, Gaskon succeeds in creating contesting and difficult artworks that challenge the viewers sense of perception, confronting them with a challenging and liberating openness and indecision.