Zuzanna Czebatul, Rites de Passage

On the occasion of Zuzanna Czebatul’s current exhibition « Nothing Vast Without a Curse » with Mel Odom, the gallery is pleased to present an online viewing room with a series of woven patches produced by the artist.

Zuzanna Czebatul’s trio of twirling bomber jackets (Mission to protect and inspire heroism in all forms, 2026), captured mid-air, recall the same hypnotic formation as Matisse’s La Danse (1910), the dreamlike composition commissioned by Russian entrepreneur and collector Sergei Shchukin, but without the bourgeois lustre. A jubilatory celebration of life exchanged for a necropolitical sabbath, the kiss of death bestowed upon meaning until this latter, forever fragile, implodes. As if to underscore this total collapse of symbolic order, the satin surfaces of Czebatul’s updated version are stitched with textile patchworks, miniature copies of work art history’s greats – Otto Dix, Tamara de Lempicka, Dürer, Michelangelo, Goya, Rubens, Jean Cocteau, the list goes on. What these flattened images have in common is that they either depict war or were made by artists who worked through war(s), a crude, chronological timeline, given the bomber jacket’s original function, of a militaristic surcharge hors norme.