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  "description": "Jan Baszak works with sculpture, installation, and textile. Based in Berlin. A Catapult Artist in Focus on interspecies intimacy and post-human shelter.",
  "path": "/jan-baszak-catapult-artist-in-focus/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-13T04:04:43.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.munchiesart.club",
  "tags": [
    "WHOISPOLA, Warsaw",
    "janbaszak.pl",
    "@baszakjan",
    "Jan Baszak",
    "\"Dead Dogs Don't Die\" at SLUG in Leipzig",
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  "textContent": "**Jan Baszak**\n\n**Born:**\nSzczecin, Poland, 1994\n\n**Based in:**\nBerlin, Germany\n\n**Medium:**\nSculpture, Installation, Textile\n\n**Education:**\nUniversity of Fine Arts, Poznań (2017)\nAcademy of Arts, Szczecin (2019)\nPhD candidate, Academy of Arts, Szczecin\n\n**Recent Exhibitions:**\n_Letztraum_ , ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań, 2025\n _Skinned And Spinned_ , WHOISPOLA / Constellation Festival, Warsaw, 2025\n _Dead Dogs Don't Die_ , SLUG, Leipzig, 2024\n\n**Represented by:**\nWHOISPOLA, Warsaw\n\n**Website:**\njanbaszak.pl\n\n**Instagram:**\n@baszakjan\n\n**Photography:**\nFilip Preis\n\n**Image Courtesy:**\nCourtesy the Artist\n\n## Jan Baszak - Berlin, Sculpture and Installation\n\nThe structures Jan Baszak assembles from textile scraps and bent metal carry the proportions of human bodies, and then push just past them. One horse stands on a spindle, its mane falling the way a relic falls, accumulated and irreversible. Another is blackened, carrying a bird on its back, as though the question of which species gets to carry which had already been settled, quietly, without human input.\n\nBaszak works at the point where intimacy meets melancholy and stays there, neither resolving the tension nor explaining it. His materials, reclaimed textiles, post-human residues, metal that looks handled rather than forged, arrive at the work already used, already carrying a previous life, already slightly out of place in the category of raw material. The sourcing is a form of argument.\n\n> Baszak's sculptures don't occupy space, they propose arrangements. The question is not what they depict but who they were built for.\n\nIn \"Letztraum,\" his 2025 solo exhibition at ZAMEK Culture Centre in Poznań, Baszak built a freestanding structure from textile scraps and metal that read simultaneously as greenhouse, shelter, and den.\n\n****Jan Baszak**** , Letztraum, 2025, installation view at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Textile and metal horse sculpture staged against draped fabric. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.****Jan Baszak,**** Letztraum, 2025, installation view at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Multiple textile and metal structures arranged as interspecies environments within historic architecture. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist\n\n****Jan Baszak**** (right), Letztraum, 2025, detail view at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Suspended textile horse figure positioned against marble architecture. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist. -- ****Jan Baszak**** (right), Letztraum, 2025, detail view at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Textile and wooden structure with cascading fibres forming a fragmented animal body. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.\n\n****Jan Baszak,**** Letztraum, 2025, installation view at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Textile and wooden structures with cascading fibres forming animal-like bodies in space. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.\n\nThe title borrows from German the sense of a last room, and the work held that ambiguity between refuge and terminus without choosing between them. Curated by Jagna Domzalska and Kamil Mizgala, \"Letztraum\" framed interspecies cohabitation not as a utopian proposal but as a structural problem, and offered architecture, however provisional, as a working answer.\n\nThe horses that appeared at Vienna Contemporary 2025 through WHOISPOLA worked differently: not enclosed but exposed, their rough-edged surfaces carrying the look of things made under pressure rather than modeled. These are not idealized animals.\n\n****Jan Baszak**** , Letztraum, 2025, installation views at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Textile, fur, and metal structures forming fragmented animal bodies within architectural space. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.\n\n****Jan Baszak**** , Letztraum, 2025, installation view at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Sculptural head with cascading textile elements alongside metal and fibre structures in space. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.****Jan Baszak**** , Letztraum, 2025, installation view at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Sculptural head positioned within a doorway framing the architectural axis of the space. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.\n\n****Jan Baszak**** , Letztraum, 2025, installation views at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Textile horse-like figure shown across multiple perspectives, emphasizing material surface, posture, and constructed anatomy. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.\n\nThey have weight, an indifference to the human gaze, and a quality the work describes as \"Halloween egalitarianism\", a carnivalesque leveling of hierarchy that doesn't celebrate so much as assume that the leveling was always already underway.\n\nBaszak's interest in counterfeit design and copymaking runs through the texture of the work. A tapestry is also a copy of a drawing. A sculptural horse assembled from stitched scraps is a copy of a copy of an animal. The chain of reproduction is the point, not a failure of the original but a deliberate loosening of the idea that originals hold priority.\n\n****Jan Baszak**** , Letztraum, 2025, installation detail at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Cluster of small textile bird sculptures arranged across the floor. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.****Jan Baszak**** installation view Letztraum horse sculptures in architectural interior ZAMEK Poznan Filip Preis\n\nBaszak graduated from the University of Fine Arts in Poznań in 2017 and the Academy of Arts in Szczecin in 2019, where he is currently pursuing a PhD in artistic practice. He worked as an assistant in Artur Malewski's Sculpture Studio from 2020 to 2021. He lives and works in Berlin.\n\nHis practice has moved across \"1.90 m\" at CSW Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw, which placed his own body at the proportional center of sculptural thinking, and group presentations including \"Dead Dogs Don't Die\" at SLUG in Leipzig and \"Skinned And Spinned\" with WHOISPOLA at the Constellation Festival in Warsaw. He is represented by WHOISPOLA.\n\n****Jan Baszak**** , Letztraum, 2025, installation view at ZAMEK Culture Centre, Poznań. Sculptural head with cascading hair mounted on a vertical metal structure. Photo by Filip Preis, courtesy of the artist.\n\nWhat his structures propose, shelter, arrangement, cohabitation, no animal or human has confirmed yet.\n\nInstagram Jan Baszak\n\n**About Catapult**\n\nThis is an artist interview published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond.\ncatapult.art\n\nWant to be featured? Submit your work →\n\n* * *\n\n## Related Readings\n\nFeatured\n\n## Theresa Rothe: The Surreal Canvas Where Dreams And Materials Collide\n\nRead More\n\nFeatured\n\n## Ophelia Arc: Sculpting the Psychological Knot\n\nRead More\n\nFeatured\n\n## Karina Mendreczky and Katalin Kortmann Járay: The Collaborative Brilliance Exploring the Boundaries of Art\n\nRead More",
  "title": "A Shelter Built for Species We Don't Have Names For - Jan Baszak Artist In Focus",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-13T04:04:42.777Z"
}