Thursday, January 23 – Tuesday, April 19, 2025
Peninsula
13 Monroe Street, New York, NY 10002
Private tours will be scheduled with Jan Baracz, Izabela Gola visual arts curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York, and Peninsula’s director, Eric Fallen.
Thursday, February 20 at 6:00 PM
Music for Alligators artist performance followed by a conversation
49 Monroe St, New York, NY 10002
“The exhibition is rife with conceptual riches and one of the best readymade shows I have had the pleasure to see.” – Ekin Erkan for The Brooklyn Rail
twilight mechanics, the current solo exhibition of Jan Baracz at Peninsula, is now open until April 19, 2025.
Expanding on Jan Baracz’s concurrent solo show, twilight mechanics, a special program took place on February 20, featuring a performance Music for Alligators by the artist and his collaborators; Justine Vaccine and Isaac Gerard, followed by a conversation with the artist, the writer, Carlo McCormick, the exhibition curator, Izabela Gola, gallery director, Eric Fallen, performers, and audience.
twilight mechanics is a window onto the unfathomable, a channel through the unconscious on the landfill of the Anthropocene.
Walk into a space to witness familiar narratives collapse. In his current body of work, Baracz examines the impact of the crawling civilizational collapse on the individual psyche.
Using materials sourced from the fringes of industrial production, Baracz crafts works that redirect our gaze inward, onto what isn’t readily apparent, the submerged regions of the self. His probing, associative poetic reframes modes of perception, and manifests ways in which our notion of reality, impacted by the manifold crises, is disfigured.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jan Baracz is a Polish born artist living in New York since 1981. He’s known for his installation works, sculptures and photography. Baracz has shown internationally at the Contemporary Art Center, Warsaw, Poland, Art Unlimited, Basel, Switzerland and artMbassy Gallery, in Berlin, Germany. Baracz’s video Eyebeads by Words Held Fast premiered in New York in 2006. In 2008, he produced the cinematic installation LIVE VIDEO at Art in General in NYC, and in 2012 he exhibited his sculptural project How to Float Above the Psychic Stampede at the Stoyanov Gallery in NYC. Baracz’s installation On the Nature of Dust Deposits, Minerva Owl Flight Patterns and Other Commonly Overlooked Events had been on view at Hudson Valley MOCA in Peekskill, NY from 2017 to 2019. In 2022 Konnotation Press published his photography book, Eyebeads by Words Held Fast. His last solo exhibition Mutiny’s Darling (2023) at Peninsula Gallery in NYC was reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail. He has received grants and awards from Art Matters, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Kosciuszko Foundation among others. Baracz’s photography has appeared in Paris Review, American Letters & Commentary, and numerous other magazines.
Lead image: Jan Baracz, DARK DIAL, 2024. 35 x 20 inches x 22 inches. Oil drum lid, surfboard fin, assorted car tires.
Portrait of Jan Baracz, photo by Robert La Force
twilight mechanics is curated by the Polish Cultural Institute New York Visual Arts Curator Izabela Gola
