Jan Baszak - Berlin, Sculpture and Installation

The structures Jan Baszak assembles from textile scraps and bent metal carry the proportions of human bodies, and then push just past them. One horse stands on a spindle, its mane falling the way a relic falls, accumulated and irreversible. Another is blackened, carrying a bird on its back, as though the question of which species gets to carry which had already been settled, quietly, without human input.

Baszak works at the point where intimacy meets melancholy and stays there, neither resolving the tension nor explaining it. His materials, reclaimed textiles, post-human residues, metal that looks handled rather than forged, arrive at the work already used, already carrying a previous life, already slightly out of place in the category of raw material. The sourcing is a form of argument.

Baszak's sculptures don't occupy space, they propose arrangements. The question is not what they depict but who they were built for.

In "Letztraum," his 2025 solo exhibition at ZAMEK Culture Centre in Poznań, Baszak built a freestanding structure from textile scraps and metal that read simultaneously as greenhouse, shelter, and den.

The title borrows from German the sense of a last room, and the work held that ambiguity between refuge and terminus without choosing between them. Curated by Jagna Domzalska and Kamil Mizgala, "Letztraum" framed interspecies cohabitation not as a utopian proposal but as a structural problem, and offered architecture, however provisional, as a working answer.

The horses that appeared at Vienna Contemporary 2025 through WHOISPOLA worked differently: not enclosed but exposed, their rough-edged surfaces carrying the look of things made under pressure rather than modeled. These are not idealized animals.

They have weight, an indifference to the human gaze, and a quality the work describes as "Halloween egalitarianism", a carnivalesque leveling of hierarchy that doesn't celebrate so much as assume that the leveling was always already underway.

Baszak's interest in counterfeit design and copymaking runs through the texture of the work. A tapestry is also a copy of a drawing. A sculptural horse assembled from stitched scraps is a copy of a copy of an animal. The chain of reproduction is the point, not a failure of the original but a deliberate loosening of the idea that originals hold priority.

Baszak graduated from the University of Fine Arts in Poznań in 2017 and the Academy of Arts in Szczecin in 2019, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in artistic practice. He worked as an assistant in Artur Malewski's Sculpture Studio from 2020 to 2021. He lives and works in Berlin.

His practice has moved across "1.90 m" at CSW Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw, which placed his own body at the proportional center of sculptural thinking, and group presentations including "Dead Dogs Don't Die" at SLUG in Leipzig and "Skinned And Spinned" with WHOISPOLA at the Constellation Festival in Warsaw. He is represented by WHOISPOLA.

What his structures propose, shelter, arrangement, cohabitation, no animal or human has confirmed yet.

Instagram Jan Baszak

Related Readings