from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 10

HONZA ZAMOJSKI

BY SABRINA TAMAR

It is the simplest of forms: the stick figure—humorous and naïve. Honza Zamojski is no stranger to these qualities. His work, spanning multiple forms of media, ex- udes an unabashedly childlike spirit, fusing playful curiosity and subjectivity that, at first glance, might belie its philosophical and intellectual rigor. The personal melds with the theoretical and the banal in equal measure. Zamojski celebrates and explores the commonplace, yielding work that directly confronts the mundane, inviting inquiry on a structural and ethical level.

Known for his commentary on contemporary culture, Zamojski shifts between sculpture, photography, and art book publishing, often complementing his creative acts with original theories that pair the abstract process of creation with self-made systems of classification. For instance, his “Four Egg” theory assigns the qualities of “Inspiration, Intuition, Item, and Idea” to a diagram of eggs representing each, floating between the hemispheres of “thinking zone” versus “effect zone.” Yet, Zamojski argues these categorizations relate more to life experience than any alleged artistic practice.

In the series Running Man a stick figure runs across each page, uncertain if he is running to or from something or someone. A palpable sense of doubt and anxi- ety pervades, though not without the artist’s distinctive sense of humor. Words and slices of collaged primary colors appear to obstruct the runner’s path or make up parts of his body. The drawing’s use of text reflects a common theme in Zamojski’s work: the belief that each form of media is not an untranslatable code but rather
a different word in a “personal” language. To change from photography to drawing does not signify a change in subject, but merely another way of once again at- tempting the same topic at hand.

Watching his stick figure run back and forth, the artist’s self-described ethos comes to mind: “To make it work, you need to make it work.” The tautology seizes the paradoxical and yet inevitable simple essence of artistic practice: the cyclical nature of creation.

Polish artist Honza Zamojski’s practice spans multiple genres and mediums, from photography, to drawing, to sculpture, to artist's books. His work has appeared in exhibitions internationally. He's presented his lecture on self-publishing, titled “How it's Made,” at the Centre Pompidou (2013), MoMA Library, and Printed Matter, New York (both 2012). A new body of work, entitled Ghostism will be exhibited at OSMOS Address in New York in October 2016.