Take a Swing on the Thread of Life

Take a Swing on the Thread of Life gathers the Polish artist Jan Dobkowski's largest single body of drawing, a set of 383 works in pencil made over ten years and united by an obsessive, symmetrical figuration.

Each drawing is worked on handmade paper at a uniform 36 by 47 cm, the figures built from mirrored, sagittal repetitions that let one body part stand in for another: a toe or a tongue swells into a bulb recalling a glans, an ear coils into a double, information-spewing form. The book was published by Kodoji Press in a softcover edition of 400 to accompany the premiere exhibition, and includes an essay by the critic Janusz Zagrodzki, who reads the work as a record of inner transmutation from analysis to synthesis, a contemplation in which the sacred and the erotic stay bound together.

Dobkowski (b. 1942) emerged in the Polish neo-avant-garde of the 1960s and has worked across painting, drawing, and object-based art since, consistently returning to the body as a site where biomorphic invention and pointed eroticism meet. Take a Swing on the Thread of Life represents the fullest late statement of that preoccupation, distilled into a single obsessively repeated cast of figures.