Artists

Anka Dabrowska

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Anka Dabrowska

Born in Poland and now living in London, Dabrowska adopts the position of an outsider or stranger to respond to a sense of displacement increasingly common to inhabitants of contemporary metropolises. Dabrowska’s drawings and sculpted ‘anti-structures’ drawn from documentary research of Warsaw, explore the changing façade of the city. She combines her own disjointed recollections with the present reality to examine the disparity between individual identity and collective memory. In her delicate drawings, tenement blocks, shop fronts and street signs are set adrift against the disquieting blankness of an empty page. Contrasting with the fragile precision of her drawn lines, Dabrowska uses spray-painted marks to reproduce the irreverent patter of Warsaw graffiti-while semi-abstract designs recall the half-remembered fragments of domestic interiors. The three dimensional works are based on makeshift commercial structures that punctuate Eastern Europe. Haphazard collages of impoverished materials- suggesting an almost schizophrenic confusion of internal and external space– Dabrowska’s improvised ‘kiosks’ offer a noisy counterpart to the whispered eloquence of her drawings. Like the buildings on which they are based– many of which now lay abandoned-Dabrowska’s crude anti-structures evoke confused afterthoughts of consumerist delirium. Built from the disregarded wreckage of everyday life, Dabrowska combines cardboard, wood, garish plastics and concrete alongside documentary snapshots and bright blotches of sprayed graffiti.


Although her work is intensely autobiographical it moves beyond personal circumstances to address the common drift through our shared environment, tracing the possibilities for a poetic recuperation of our alienated urban spaces. Anka Dabrowska (b. 1979 Warsaw, Poland) graduated in 2003 from University of Northumbria in Newcastle where she attained her Masters in Fine Art with distinction. She lives and works in London and has exhibited widely nationally and internationally.She is the winner of Juliet gomperts trust project award, London 2005 and 2006 respectively.

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