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Garden of Eden Series (Ceramics)

Collaborative installation by Maciej Urbanek and Olivia Fero brings together monumental painting and intimate sculptural form in a contemplative, immersive environment. The work unfolds as a dialogue between scale and intimacy, surface and volume, permanence and fragility, evoking the image of a forest and its silent, desiccated fruit. Urbanek presents three large-scale abstract paintings on […]

Collaborative installation by Maciej Urbanek and Olivia Fero brings together monumental painting and intimate sculptural form in a contemplative, immersive environment. The work unfolds as a dialogue between scale and intimacy, surface and volume, permanence and fragility, evoking the image of a forest and its silent, desiccated fruit. Urbanek presents three large-scale abstract paintings on paper, each measuring approximately four metres by one and a half metres, installed side by side to form a triptych. Despite their abstract language, the paintings carry a sombre, almost elegiac presence. Executed predominantly in black, white and silvery pewter tones, their surfaces shimmer subtly as they catch the light, producing an unstable optical effect that shifts with the viewer’s movement. The imagery suggests bundles of dried twigs, burnt ruins, or stands of birch trees reduced to spectral forms. These works are the result of a process in which highly diluted acrylic paint is guided by water across the paper’s surface, allowing gravity, absorption and material resistance to shape the final image. The paper itself reacts physically, buckling and undulating, becoming a record of forces acting upon it rather than a neutral support. Placed before this painted “forest” are Olivia Fero’s three ceramic sculptures, each formed from a continuous strand of clay that twists, loops and reconnects with itself, creating knotted, self-contained forms. Roughly thirty by thirty centimetres in scale, the sculptures rest on white plinths, asserting a quiet but insistent presence against the vastness of the paintings behind them. Their surfaces are coated in a glossy white crackle glaze, over which jet-black paint is applied in a seemingly random, camouflage-like pattern. These objects read simultaneously as fruits, relics, or remnants—forms that appear sealed, complete, and inert. Together, the paintings and sculptures construct an environment that is austere, reflective and emotionally restrained. The forest is monochrome, mournful, and stripped of vitality; its fruit appears equally lifeless, frozen at a point between growth and decay. The installation resists narrative clarity, instead encouraging a slow, meditative engagement in which viewers oscillate between material observation and symbolic association.

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    • Artaxis Organization Inc. 2005-2026

    Artaxis Organization Inc. 2005-2026