“Composing an orderly ‘cosmos’ out of the chaos of reality becomes, for the individual, an impos­sible task or one that leads straight to insanity”. Thus wrote Jan Błoński about Cosmos, Witold Gombrowicz’s final novel. The sen­tence “It wasn’t there yesterday” was bor­rowed from the novel to serve as the title of the exhibition – an exhibition that takes on a similar chal­lenge, stret­ched, nonetheless, across the shoul­ders of four indepen­dent artists. Gombrowicz’s protagonists are set in summer resort in the Zakopane region of Poland, attemp­ting to crack a code of seemin­gly abs­tract signs – stains and cracks in the ceiling, a twig han­ging on a string. This exhibition, set in a gal­lery space located in cen­tral Warsaw, is an examination of the con­tem­porary poten­tial of abs­trac­tion – both in life and in art. Through a range of exam­ples across a variety of genres, we observe the ten­sion that is created between objects and materials that are familiar to us from our everyday lives and the lan­guage of abs­trac­tion. Abs­trac­tion, once associated with a break with nar­rative struc­tures and represen­tation, can also be treated as a reflec­tion of a higher order that governs our human activities. The cosmos of abs­trac­tion and the cosmos of the everyday come together in specific places and times, often arran­ged or documen­ted by the artists. The works presen­ted in the show It Wasn’t There Yester­day hover between a documen­tary record and a fan­tastic creation, united by the urge to release form from its utilitarian associations. 

This is retrospec­tion, introspec­tion and projec­tion all at once, a mixture of moments in time, nar­rations and artistic traditions – experimen­tal film, decorative art, post-​conceptual actions, abs­tract pain­tings – which pursue ful­fil­l­ment in the unreal, a creative per­spec­tive on the physics presiding over everyday life.