Wait Till Evening to See How Luminous the Day Has Been | 2015 | Jurek Wajdowicz
"Solace and Light" presents 16 works by Jurek Wajdowicz, tracing how real spaces are transformed through color, light, reflection, and focus into abstract lens-based art. Suspended between photography and painting, the images move from luminosity toward uncertainty, inviting a slower kind of looking in which perception and emotion arrive before explanation.
This presentation of 16 works from "Solace and Light" offers a concentrated encounter with Jurek Wajdowicz’s lens-based art and how familiar space can become something newly perceived.
The images begin in real places. A wall, an opening, a reflection, a shadow, a fragment of architecture, or a passing condition of light may provide the starting point. Through sustained looking and an intuitive in-camera process, those elements loosen from their original context. Space becomes color; a reflection becomes atmosphere; an opening can feel like a threshold into somewhere less certain.
The resulting images hover between photography and painting. Some are luminous and meditative; others carry darker interruptions, spatial tension, or traces of something only partly recognizable. Beauty is present, but rarely without ambiguity. As reviewers have observed, the work suggests that “beauty can hold complexity, that light can carry weight.”
For Wajdowicz, that ambiguity is central: the moment when a place ceases to be merely what it is and becomes something perceived, imagined, remembered, or felt.
The exhibition coincides with the new monograph "Solace and Light," published by Kehrer Verlag and available in November 2026. Bringing together approximately 100 color plates presenting Wajdowicz’s lens-based art, alongside poems by Wisława Szymborska, the book extends the experience of these 14 works into a larger, more sustained visual sequence.