Marlena’s distinctive hybrid work mixes pared-down text with elements of architecture, painting and graphic design. Recently she has started integrating new technology into her work.

In 1993, Marlena received a BFA in painting at the College of Arts, Jaroslaw (Poland) followed by an MFA in painting and drawing at the Academy of Fine Art, Poznan, Poland (1998). Currently working on the research for the conference project ‘Post Image’ to be organized in cooperation with Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (Germany) durning the residency program in 2005 and in 2003, was a resident at Art Omi International Arts Center Program (NY).

Recent solo exhibitions include: 2007, NN, Institute in Glasspavillon, Berlin/with Anne Gathmann. 2004, ‘POINT OF VIEW’, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany and in 2002, ”oxygenation” (solo show), Municipal Gallery, Poznan.

Projects and Exhibitions at Location One:
The Image With No Shadow: Video Projection: Residents’ Exhibition Spring 2005

Online:
Video Interview with by Katherine Carl, assistant curator of contemporary exhibitions at the Drawing Center

Marlena’s residency at Location One is supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

C Magazine press on The Image with No Shadow

Fluid Sunset review part 1 & Fluid Sunset review part 2

English translation:

Marlena Kudlicka Fluid 08(54)2005
the space for words
text Alexandra Robakowska

Two glittering green words spread out along the 15 m long gallery wall. Sunset Sunset – the words are screaming. The colors are pulsating, passing through and infiltrating each other. The galley interior is immersed in a bright yellow, foggy glow. The words look self-assured; they allure and attract. The viewer’s attention is focused only on them. The enormous inscription is displayed on the wall from a video projector suspended on the opposite wall.

Sunset. Stop-frame. The projection of meanings is starting.

Marlena Kudlicka was recently a participant at the Location One Residency Program in New York. The project ’The image that emits no shadow/Sunset/’ was prepared for Location One Gallery. She has taken inspiration from the post-image trend. For her project, she selected a photograph by Steven Shore from a series dating from the 70s. The photograph shows a lonely cinema house with the letters SUNSET painted on the building facade. The building is located in a Texan desert landscape, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Marlena renewed the hand painted fonts and shifted the words into digital space. With great precision, almost a painting process, she worked pixel by pixel, faithfully reconstructing the font, replicating the word and giving it a new tint.

Sunset Sunset the artist extracted the framed word from its original drift. Unchaining it from narrow syntactic categories, she opened the word up to multiple meanings, meanings that are expanded by the individual viewer’s potential. And he or she in confrontation with Kudlicka’s works becomes co-author; actively playing with semantic/aesthetic imaginary juxtapositions.

Sunset – natural phenomena, glistening exposure on the day/night border, the colors dance continuously passing through one other, light and darkness this time stay on the same side. The image in a move, a portrait of fascinating transformation. The word is frozen; drifting in our mind.

An American dream, romance, space and cinematography.

The art-work is apparently full contradictions. Created by a Polish artist, it is soaked with an American touch and vibrating with dreams and meanings.

To visualize language and language becomes a visual landscape Marlena Kudlicka writes. She is a graduate of the Painting and Drawing Department at The Academy of Fine Art in Poznan, Poland. The artist uses language as a medium in her work. She creates highly aesthetic/semantic landscapes – open work- moving senses that are floating along intentions: of the author, of the text, of the viewer.

In Marlena’s work, words are shaped into images in a universe of juxtaposed meanings. Her painterly multimedia works appear almost as a kind of architecture. Strongly based on the context of the exhibition space, they create their own space and formulate new rules from the beginning. Because Kudlicka builds space for words

A year ago at Akademie Schloss Solitude the artist exhibited an installation titled ’POINT OF VIEW’. In that gallery space she built a 25m long curving wall; suspending 82 ’traffic circle’ street signs. The signs were arranged into a gigantic ’POINT OF VIEW’ inscription. The dark gallery space was lit only by two neon black lights. Viewers who entered the space were suddenly placed into the nonidentity of black space. After a while, the viewer’s senses adapted to these conditions and from the darkness white arrows on the blue surface of the signs started to glow: so that the viewer experienced a vibrating hypnotic suggestion.

In the turning point of our times, we often direct our attention to things in themselves and not on their meanings. Marlena Kudlicka reveals a scholastic dimension of reflection on words. Her work touches a formal mannerism while uncovering a basic code structure from existing contexts. It is paradoxical, like Umberto Eco’s conception of work as a discussion of its own poetic.

In Marlena Kudlicka text based works there is room for a broad spectrum of interpretations along with a simultaneous pointing to a code source; bright green flash light, the last beam of sunset, neon cinema light, Hollywood dream factory or pulsating blood vessel system highways. These readings are evident but not imposed. This is art that stimulates senses.