Magdalena Lubińska
Magdalena Lubińska is a visual artist whose practice explores the relationship between the body, time, and the material perception of the world.
In the Soft Monolith series, she returns after more than two decades to sukno, a dense woolen fabric that shaped the language of her early practice. The works created at that time gained international recognition and entered museum and private collections, including the collection of Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie. Deeply rooted in European mountain and pastoral cultures, sukno carries the memory of manual labor, bodily protection, survival, and communal experience. Lubińska shifts this context beyond utility and folklore, treating the material as an autonomous sculptural substance.
Her practice moves away from narrative and expression in favor of an ontological engagement with the medium. The forms emerge through a gradual transformation of the material, in which rhythm, weight, and the inherent properties of wool co-shape the structure of the object. Through accumulation and compression, the soft woolen surface gradually acquires a monumental and geological presence. Bearing traces of the body and manual labor, the objects evoke sediment, rock formations, or fragments of landscape shaped by time. The tension between the softness of wool and the monolithic quality of the form destabilizes the perception of the material, suspending the works between the archaic and the contemporary.
The accumulation of layers functions in her practice as a sediment of time. The objects emerge through rhythm and slow transformation, closer to geological processes than to expressive gesture. Soft, quiet, yet monolithic, Lubińska’s works evoke pre-cultural and atavistic relationships between the body, matter, and the need for protection, drawing attention to weight, touch, and embodied perception.
Magdalena Lubińska is a visual artist whose practice explores the relationship between the body, time, and the material perception of the world.
In the Soft Monolith series, she returns after more than two decades to sukno, a dense woolen fabric that shaped the language of her early practice. The works created at that time gained international recognition and entered museum and private collections, including the collection of Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie. Deeply rooted in European mountain and pastoral cultures, sukno carries the memory of manual labor, bodily protection, survival, and communal experience. Lubińska shifts this context beyond utility and folklore, treating the material as an autonomous sculptural substance.
Her practice moves away from narrative and expression in favor of an ontological engagement with the medium. The forms emerge through a gradual transformation of the material, in which rhythm, weight, and the inherent properties of wool co-shape the structure of the object. Through accumulation and compression, the soft woolen surface gradually acquires a monumental and geological presence. Bearing traces of the body and manual labor, the objects evoke sediment, rock formations, or fragments of landscape shaped by time. The tension between the softness of wool and the monolithic quality of the form destabilizes the perception of the material, suspending the works between the archaic and the contemporary.
The accumulation of layers functions in her practice as a sediment of time. The objects emerge through rhythm and slow transformation, closer to geological processes than to expressive gesture. Soft, quiet, yet monolithic, Lubińska’s works evoke pre-cultural and atavistic relationships between the body, matter, and the need for protection, drawing attention to weight, touch, and embodied perception.