Drawing on the subversive William S. Burroughs novel The Soft Machine (1961), Piotrowski’s work explores themes of the human body under siege, repetitive rituals and institutions of control. Through an immersive installation of paintings, cut-outs, experimental music and live performance, structure and order are broken down and unanswered fundamental questions of human nature confronted. Trained in traditional techniques of drawing and painting, Piotrowski returns to the classical subjects of religion, science and sociology, continually exploring the physicality of the human body and the mechanisms of its control.

Piotrowski’s motifs themselves resemble Burrough’s infamous cut-up technique, as images taken from archival and digital sources are sliced up, rearranged and layered to create complex formal and symbolic webs. Mining images from medical books, popular culture, religious texts and natural processes, Piotrowski folds in the past with the present, both building up and dissolving patterns to expose and reveal constructed exteriors.

By painstakingly hand-cutting banal PVC matting, Piotrowski renders the industrial intimate, as the tough surface dissolves into a porous palette defined by its patterning. In the vast atrium of the Arthaus, Piotrowski will extend the three-dimensionality of his cut-outs to create a grand site-specific installation in one of his most ambitious projects to date, that will not only push the limits of physicality of the artist, but explore the viewer’s experience of their own physicality within the space.

To mark the opening of the exhibition, the artist will debut a new collaborative performance with Japanese musician Ayumi Sawa and German musician Lars Korb that uses light, shadow and sound to construct a multi-sensorial environment which resonates through the bodies present in the space. Performing within veiled walls, and reduced to mere shadows of patterned forms created through movement, the musicians will play hand-made digitalised instruments and construct layers of meditative reverberations that explore the sensorial effects of sound on the body. The deitrus of this performance will remain in the gallery for the remainder of the exhibition – traces of the inaccessible bodies that once inhabited the space.