Izabela Gola (b. Kielce, Poland) works with multimedia narrative environments, including porcelain sculpture, video, and installation, to explore ideas revolving around memory, identity, and displacement. Gola interrelates landscapes and imagery sourced from her own biography to express the relationship between a figure and a context. Memories related to events, characters, and places from her life are transcribed into blue glaze paintings depicting partially obscured landscapes with hints of figuration and abstraction, painted on porcelain plates resembling hanging shrouds. These constructed narratives are anchored by emotions related to memories, rather than their representation. The porcelain objects become materialized surrogates or imprints of feelings about the past.
In her visual style, Gola draws from Surrealism, Romanticism, the Hudson River School, and conventions of classic landscape painting, as well as abstracted ceramic decorative motifs used for millennia in ceramic traditions across Asia and Europe.
Gola associates the color blue with the deepest color on the spectrum palette in landscape painting since Renaissance. Blue, being the immaculate depth of a void, speaks to the depth of emotion and time, as linked to memory.
Consequently, the object is a materialized stand in for a memory, while seriality references its narrative sequential nature. The fragility of porcelain resonates with the ephemerality of the remembering process. The mirror plates shaped after porcelain pieces point to mechanisms of memory and its reflective nature. Representation of each landscape is multiplied, undergoes repetition, is a reinterpretation of the original. Unveiled first in the outer glossy glazed front surface layer, the image is then traced after the original and rendered as partially obscured, hidden in the inner layer. The unglazed backside of the porcelain shroud is reflected in the mirror and further disseminated, fading to infinity. The mirror both multiplies and simultaneously obstructs the image, allowing for a partial reading.
Gola points toward the relentlessly negotiated, agonized, malleable nature of memory. The objects become containers for memory, an overtly felt exalted presence, a materialized void, or the transitory state in-between.
Izabela Gola graduated from Hunter College in New York Masters of Fine Arts program (2015), and she is a recipient of the Hunter MFA Award and The Eleanor Gay Lee Award.
Gola’s major group exhibitions include a video screening at MoMA Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011), a video screening and sculpture installation at Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY (2018), a video, sound, and sculpture installation at Peninsula Art Space, New York (2015), and a series of sculptures at The Royal Gallery /The Royal Society of American Art in Brooklyn, NY (2021).
©Izabela Gola portrait by Jonny Turton.
ARTWORKS
![4 Going After Paradise [Mojave], 2019 1](https://taylorponceart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/4-Going-After-Paradise-Mojave-2019-1-279x279.jpg)
![2 Going After Paradise [Bushwick] 1](https://taylorponceart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2-Going-After-Paradise-Bushwick-1-scaled-279x279.jpg)
