Krystyna Ziach, Marged Disciplines, text by Hans Rooseboom, 2014

Hans Rooseboom, curator of photography at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and guest curator of solo exhibition Space of Imagination in 2014-2015 at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague, NL.
Museum Beelden aan Zee, no.4, NL, art magazine, 2014

Once a year the Beelden aan Zee museum takes a sidetrack and makes an exhibition about photography – though the connection with sculpture is never far-off. /.../. This fall the series is continued by Krystyna Ziach, who also had a background as a sculptress, but today mainly works and is known as a photographer. After her education at the Academies of Fine Art in Cracow and Enschede (1973-1982), Krystyna Ziach developed into a photographer. Ziach has been an equally devoted practitioner of sculpture and photography and in doing so has spanned the gap between these two disciplines. In the exhibition organized this fall by the Beelden aan Zee museum, the emphasis is on a series of works from the early nineties. These so-called photo sculptures are monumental spatial constructions or installations in which photos are incorporated. It is in this very series of works that Krystyna Ziach’s ‘dual background’ becomes visible and the two disciplines, photography and sculpture, merge. Even more so: they play an equal part. Never before in this exhibition series has this been so evident. As Ziach puts it herself, her education in sculpture formed her way of looking at things. Even after applying herself to photography, she has always continued to look at reality like a sculptress. The photo sculptures have geometrical shapes - squares, triangles and circles - which Ziach combines with materials such as sand, salt and charcoal. In this way she creates captivating conceptual works in which the sculptress / photographer plays with optical illusions and the symbolic. Krystyna Ziach lives in Amsterdam. Her photographs are included in various important collections of, among others, tin various important collections of, among others: Centre Pompidou / Bibliothèque Kandinsky, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.