The gestures and bodies in Joanna Piotrowska’s BURROWED break the fourth wall, turning the viewer from a passive observer into a confidant. On view at the Project Space of Palazzo Strozzi from November 10 to January 24, her black-and-white photographs and collages draw you in, then turn the gaze back onto you.
Piotrowska is a Polish artist working dynamically across the mediums of photography, performance, and film. Drawing on family archives, self-defence manuals, and psychotherapeutic methods, she stages scenes that unpick the unspoken rules of family and domestic life. Her work has travelled from Tate Britain and MoMA to the 59th Venice Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and, most recently, The Common Guild in Glasgow.
BURROWED is her first solo exhibition at an Italian institution, and Florence is a fitting place for it. Palazzo Strozzi has steadily woven photography into its programme, and this show is another product of the public-private synergy that keeps the city in conversation with contemporary art from around the world.
Though just 13 works of her oeuvre, this is a concentrated and carefully paced display, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi. In the central room, five pieces are placed along the walls with precision, their sizes interspersed so that a large print gives way to a smaller one, and the viewer’s eye is forever recalibrating. The two rooms branching off it hold four works each.
Motifs of hands and eyes recur throughout. In one frame, an enlarged clenched fist rests tensely on a table; elsewhere, hands intertwine, suspended between care and restraint, or fall loosely, in a gesture any Florentine will recognize from the Renaissance paintings around the city. Another undercurrent is violence, though it is never explicit. It lies latent in everyday gestures. For example, the closeness between two bodies slips almost imperceptibly into constraint, and you find yourself negotiating with what you thought you knew. Is this a loving embrace, or a tightening grip? That questioning is exactly what Bigazzi means when he describes the viewer building a relationship with each work, one that “sets in motion an introspective journey.”
Her collages push further, into the surreal. An archival portrait of the artist’s mother carries a moon set over her pupil; a newborn is glimpsed through a keyhole, as though you were witnessing something private you were never meant to see; butterflies feed on what remains of flesh. Here that journey turns kaleidoscopic, moving between dream and the familiar dynamics of kinship and power.
Piotrowska’s means are deliberately pared back: silver gelatin prints, some cut and layered into collage. That economy is what makes the work so open, because it asks for an active spectator. Reduced to hands, eyes, and bodies, the images carry a sense of vanitas, a distilled essence of what remains of us. And in the collages, those physical layers become emotional ones; peeling them back, you start digging into your own memories too.
Then there is the setting itself, as much a part of the exhibition as the works. Conceived specifically for the Project Space, the Palazzo’s venue for a new generation of artists, BURROWED plays with its architecture. In the central room, a lowered, semi-translucent ceiling diffuses the light and softly reveals the windows above, a dreamlike lid that seems to contain your imagination while hinting at what lies beyond. One of the side rooms has a fireplace, an unmistakably domestic touch; just to its right hangs a collage of a giant pig looming over a reclining body, layered with hands and figures, a surreal intruder in the homeliest of settings.
It is here that the pieces come together. Fragmentary images, layered collages, and traces of memory all ask the viewer to do the assembling, perfectly in dialogue with the season’s other exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, Broken. The Power of the Fragment. Both suggest that meaning lives in the fragment rather than the whole.
Enigmatic and unresolved, BURROWED offers no tidy conclusions. Visitors in search of a clear narrative may find it elusive at first, but that is rather the point. Entry is free, daily from 10am to 8pm, so there is no excuse not to go burrowing.
