Young & Vital Artist | Stanislaw Trzebinski on his new exhibition Solastalgia

This month, Wanted profiles some of the most exciting young artists living or working in South Africa today.

Stanislaw Trzebinski’s fantastical sculptural works explore the relationships between humanity and nature. His creativity, intimately connected to Africa, is expressed through bronze casting and furniture using both bygone and cutting-edge techniques, technologies, and mediums.His first solo show with Southern Guild was at the end of 2019 and was an immersive exploration of the ocean through functional bronze sculpture.

This year, opening on 8 September and running until 10 November , is Solastalgia, offering a dark vision of nature’s continuation after humanity’s demise. Trzebinski’s work for this show delves into the metamorphosised fauna and flora of the future, focusing on biological necessity and survival.

The show aims to provoke change, enthuse reaction and promote our responsibility towards our relationship with the world around us. The theme, macabre and hopeless, has been given a golden thread by Trzebinski, sunlight in the darkness, to inspire hope within futility and the rebirth within decay. Trzebinski remarks that “We need to keep seeing the magic in the world. Beauty for beauty’s sake, nature for nature’s sake — I want people to appreciate that the natural world is worth fighting for, not because of what it represents, but simply because it is.”

I’m completely self-taught. I have been guided along the way, but my knowledge of anatomy and technical processes have been cultivated through doing as opposed to observing. I worked at understanding the complexities of bronze casting and mould-making before I learnt how to sculpt. I reverse engineered the whole process. When I first started sculpting, I didn’t have a direction. I was young and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I hadn’t developed an aesthetic language, but out of that void, my practice has come.

What materials do you use?

I work with a variety of mediums, while my final creations are usually cast in bronze. I work with wood for my functional sculptures. There is quite a funky-looking table in my upcoming show at Southern Guild. I started experimenting with 3D printing technology over lockdown since I didn’t have any access to my studio. It has been an interesting journey. At the start, I was very sceptical of the process.

It initially felt a bit like cheating because these programs allow you to import mannequins and objects and easily manipulate them. Each of my computer-generated creations are entirely unique — nobody can replicate them. It’s very much my own language. Once you have 3D printed the design, there is a lot of conventional sculpting that needs to happen on top of the print. I’ve tried to make sure that I’m very much involved in the post-processing of the prints.

I completely conceptualised, rendered and envisioned the whole of my upcoming show, Solastalgia, in 3D.

Can you tell me about your art?

My work is very much inspired by my childhood. My upbringing offered me an amazing foundation that I know I will never be able to recreate for my own children. My work draws from my own sense of nostalgia, that very particular experience of going somewhere beautiful in nature and then returning 10 years later and it’s a parking lot. It is heartbreaking to see these natural spaces being lost. I go back to Kenya two or three times a year, but it has changed so much over the last decade.

My work has always been about how we relate to the natural world and where we place ourselves within it. We’re so consumed with ourselves that we don’t appreciate the world around us, it’s a symptom of so many underlying issues. Our identity has become our online presence, our screen time, our virtual lives. My work is a commentary on our relationship, and subsequent disconnection, to the natural world. I want to encourage the viewer to take a closer look at the way they relate to their environment. This show is a lighthearted yet macabre take on how nature will always prevail.

I really want kids, but the future feels so uncertain. I want to shine light on the issues that we are facing, to start the conversation, to inspire the work, to change our ways, to truly make a difference.

Southern Guild, Silo 5, Silo District, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, 8001