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Press Release: Arnoldsche Art Publishers

DANA WIDAWSKI – Simply Decoration

“Dana Widawski’s figures … evoke a simultaneous sense of attraction and repulsion: too delicate, too cute, too pretty, too frivolous, too direct – all industrial white sugar. Something happens; you are drawn in, emotionally and personally. You are confronted with your own feelings and associations …”

Esther Niebel

In her new monograph, Dana Widawski (*1973) presents a fascinating panorama of her ceramic work from the past ten years. With subtle humour and provocative depth, her assemblages and ceramic tile panels virtuously transcend the boundaries between fine art and craft. Widawski finds her motifs and forms in everyday life, assembling them collage-like into entirely new works. Fractures and the resulting tensions are intentional and integral to her artistic language. The alterations she makes to her found objects are carefully concealed, making her interventions virtually indistinguishable from the original pieces.

For her figurative sculptures, Widawski works with industrially manufactured porcelain figurines—often damaged—as well as historical objects, which she transforms using cold paints, gold leaf, and comic-style speech bubbles. Her works play with the contrast between a charming, decorative aesthetic and unexpected statements that are socially critical, humorous, and at times disarmingly direct.

Each figurine is realised through its own carefully chosen technique. Whether incorporating music, kinetic elements, video, painting, or ceramic interventions, the artist leaves no creative possibility unexplored for her small divas. Their playful appearance often conceals feminist, provocative, and occasionally deliberately coarse messages—for example, when an elegant courtly scene is transformed into an unexpectedly risqué dialogue through comic-inspired speech bubbles.

Unlike her sculptural works, Widawski generally does not use found objects for her ceramic tile panels. Instead, she paints each unfired tile entirely by hand, employing traditional techniques such as underglaze painting. Historical visual traditions—including Delft tiles and Baroque ornament—are consciously quoted, imitated, and reinterpreted. Here, the “found object” is the historical visual language itself, which the artist appropriates in order to disrupt it with her own often unsettling, subversive, or erotic imagery.

The new publication presents Dana Widawski’s work in generous full-page illustrations. An essay by Esther Niebel and an interview between the artist and art historian Christian Lechelt provide both an art-historical and conceptual framework for the assemblages and ceramic tile panels. The result is a publication that documents an artistic balancing act that is as entertaining as it is provocative—revealing the kitsch of contemporary culture as well as that inherent in art itself, while remaining surprising, playful, and remarkably precise.