acb Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition in Hungary by Stach Szumski, one of the most prolific and internationally recognized artists of the younger generation of contemporary Polish art. Cathedral of Deep Time unfolds as a spatial and conceptual experiment in which the space of acb Plus is transformed into an imaginary cathedral on a geological scale: a speculative site where the layered relationships between matter, form, and time become perceptible.

Through a multifaceted material language encompassing paintings, large-scale murals, sculptures, ceramics, and Jacquard-woven textiles, Szumski’s exhibition investigates the malleability of matter and its internal dynamism. His works draw on mineralogical and geological imaginaries, evoking temporal scales that exceed the horizon of human experience in order to open up our collective cultural imagination toward pre- and posthuman conditions. The bone-like, crystalline, or cavernous structures that appear throughout the exhibition space thus resemble fragments of an unknown, otherworldly architecture—simultaneously recalling archaeological remains, vital structures, and the still-fragmentary skeleton of a yet-to-be-imagined civilization.

Alongside this material inquiry, Szumski engages with traditions associated with arte povera, characterized by ephemerality and earth-bound materiality. Within this context, textile emerges as a key medium through which the tension between soft and hard material qualities is negotiated: in sensory and qualitative terms, it appears to stand in contrast to stone and bone, yet these oppositions are continually dissolved and reconfigured. This dynamic becomes particularly evident in the monumental Jacquard textiles descending from the ceiling toward the floor, functioning as totemic or transitional markers within the exhibition space. The jacquard technique itself carries a proto-digital logic, as its weaving structure may be understood as a techno-archaeological precursor to binary systems and computational languages. 

Much like Szumski’s extremely precise and intricately detailed acrylic-on-canvas paintings, as well as his ceramic and other sculptural objects, these textiles incorporate motifs drawn from bone and connective tissue, microscopic natural imaginaries, landscape formations, and lenticular visual fields, evoking a post-digital, uncanny aesthetic—an unheimlich condition in which natural and technological processes merge into a hybrid unity. In doing so, the works challenge the Western epistemological separation of nature and culture, proposing instead a framework in which soft and hard materialities continuously overlap and intermingle.

In Szumski’s artistic practice, stone, bone, crystal, and textile function not merely as formal elements but as carriers of time: material media of memory in which the layers of nature and culture are inscribed into one another. His interest in geology and the long history of human visual communication converge on a shared horizon—from prehistoric cave paintings and Neolithic signs to medieval symbols and contemporary graffiti—while the works intertwine imaginaries of the past, the present, and possible futures.

Born in Gdańsk in 1992, the artist has for many years pursued a multidisciplinary practice encompassing painting, installation, sculpture, graphics, and public interventions. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, although his artistic thinking has been shaped just as significantly by the years he spent exploring abandoned buildings in Lower Silesia and carrying out artistic interventions within them. His work has been presented at numerous institutions in Poland and internationally, including the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the National Museum in Wrocław, the Kyoto Art Center, the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, the Foksal Gallery, and most recently at Galeria EL in Elbląg.