Untitled (door handles)

A spatial work in which black metal door handles constitute the principal sign-elements. They were mounted in the “white cube,” analogously to between, at various heights on the walls, corresponding to imaginary doors that would have to overlap and cross the boundaries of the walls. Dróżdż considered this still to be concrete poetry, since the handle functions here as a sign referring to the door on the principle of pars pro toto. The work was first realised at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (1999) and later at the monographic exhibition at the National Museum in Wrocław (2009). In the first version, the outer walls of the cube built inside the gallery also featured vertical columns with numbers from one to thirteen, dates from 1986 to 1999, and alternating columns filled with the repeated prepositions pod (“under”) and nad (“above”).