Goshka Macuga - the-artists.orgGoshka Macuga | the artistThe artist Goshka MacugaBorn 1967, Warsaw, Poland.Goshka Macugaartworks on eBay© photo: Hugo TillmanGoshka Macuga, Saatchi galleryTaking her sourced images from publications, and reactivating them in tooled leather, Goshka Macugas A Time To Live, A Time To Die replicates the authoritative material of book covers. Creating a double entendre cover version, Macugas drawing is a composite of other artists work, establishing a new context for image interpretation via juxtaposition of chance selection: the girl taken from Picasso, the book from Max Ernst, and birds from images from the 1905 Russian Revolution. Appropriating and reordering these disparate elements, Macuga constructs her own suggestive narrative based on an eclectic and disjointed history. Indelibly engraved on skin, A Time To Live, A Time To Die literally frames the ingrained fabric of memory as tractile experience.Today I visited Goshka Macuga at her studio in the Rochelle School overlooking Arnold Circus. I was early and as I stood waiting on the iron fire escape in the snow, I spotted Goshka, who hails from Poland originally, walking towards me taking bold strides through the snowy drifts of the Boundary Estate in a long sheepskin coat and gloves, and sporting a multicoloured Peruvian hat. She gave me a cheery wave, grabbed her mail from the box and sprinted up the stairs to greet me. Once we were inside the former schoolroom, that is now her workplace, we had a cup of tea to warm up while Goshka entertained me with dramatic tales of her Christmas adventures on the island of Stromboli, where she went to peer into the active crater of the volcano at the fountains of molten lava. It sounded pretty exciting to me…Goshka Macuga has been nominated for her solo exhibition Objects in Relation, Art Now at Tate Britain and her contribution to the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art. With video interview
