There’s a lot of art about birth, death and rebirth, but not a lot of it uses pickles. Preserves, however, are all over Polish artist Rafał Zajko’s biggest solo show yet. Big jars of brine filled with salty cucumbers and little figurines in the shape of cryogenic preservation chambers. That combination of the fantastically sci-fi and the mundanely everyday is Zajko’s hallmark. The young London-based artist has spent the past few years showing ceramic and concrete sculptures filled with flights of cybernetic romanticism and nods to vaping, baking and pickling.
In The Spin Off, as this show at Focal Point Gallery in Southend is called, he has gone on a deep dive into a vast mess of ideas about longevity and rebirth. The centre of the space is dominated by an ovoid floor sculpture that gets moved and reshaped throughout the week. Laid across its surface, ceramic tiles are assembled to look like a map of planetary systems or control panels for alien spaceships, covered in incomprehensible knobs, buttons and displays. Circular sections of it can be lifted out and replaced with items from the cabinets on the wall: little concrete eggs, ceramic kaiser rolls, jars of pickles.
