Beata Batorowicz

On the afternoon of September 29, I visited the QUT Art Museum in Brisbane City with my boyfriend, Gabriel.  I chose this gallery to visit because Gabriel studies at QUT and I had never been to their art gallery before, so I was interested to see what it was like.  As we entered, there was an information desk right in front of us, and an exhibition space leading off on either side.  My eye was first drawn to the exhibition on the left, Beata Batorowicz’s Tales Within Historical Spaces, and as I walked that way I was immediately transfixed by an image of a small girl in a red fox outfit adorning a greyscale print of bare, skeletal tree branches.  The girl was painted on top of the print, which I liked as I am a photographer myself and have always been interested in combining photography with other forms of visual art.  I quickly picked up the flyer before continuing.

Batorowicz was born in Wroclaw, Poland, but immigrated with her family to Australia in 1984 at the age of five.  In early 2011, she returned to Wroclaw for the first time to record her family’s oral history.  She also wanted to do research into the history of Fairytales from Auschwitz, a collection of children’s stories that were secretly written and illustrated by Polish prisoners in concentration camps.  What she learned on this trip formed the basis for Tales Within Historical Spaces.

As we moved through the exhibition, I noticed quickly how diverse the collection of works was.  From photographs of bare tree branches in Wroclaw, to small, beautifully simple acrylic paintings on paper, to complex sculptures, intricately crafted from leather, fur, suede, wool, felt, beads, feathers, wood and wire, among other things.  My favourite pieces were the sculptures, which were so beautiful and intricate.  I thought that I would love to be able to make things like that myself.

We then moved across to the other exhibition, open closed.  open closed is a collaboration of three Queensland artists, Lincoln Austin, Sean Phillips, and Arryn Snowball.  The three artists work in different media but have a shared sensibility.  Their work contains repeating modes, shifting visual motifs, words and phrases.  Most of the work in this exhibition used geometric shapes and forms, which made me think that if I’d seen the exhibition earlier it might have been of help for our geometry assignment.  The work in here wasn’t as appealing to me as Tales Within Historical Spaces, however I did appreciate its complexity and thought it worked well as a whole.  In saying this, I was particularly drawn to a series of geometric glass sculptures hung on the wall, which employed repeated patterns of simple shapes such as triangles and diamonds.  I enjoyed the distorted reflections in the glass, and found that when I photographed them with the flash on, the light reflected off the glass in beautiful and interesting patterns which both Gabriel and I thought looked amazing.

As we were leaving, I found that Batorowicz’s exhibition was accompanied by a bilingual book that was available at the gallery, and decided to buy it as I enjoyed her work so much.  I left feeling very inspired by what I had seen, and I would definitely visit the QUT Art Museum again.

Elizabeth Wallace