WHATIFTHEWORLD | Cape Town City Centre

RANGE OF MOTION | Michelle Czarnecki at WHATIFTHEWORLD

In her debut solo exhibition, Range of Motion, Michelle Czarnecki draws on her former career as a physiotherapist to explore the body, material memory and the shifting relationship between repair and corrosion.

For 12 years, Czarnecki worked closely with the bodies of her patients, flexing joints, working through pain and helping restore movement. That physical knowledge now informs the way she approaches calico and ink. Her surfaces are stained, cut, compressed and reconstructed, giving the traditional canvas a bodily presence that moves between painting and sculptural form.

Czarnecki works with a restricted palette of brown, green and blue inks, allowing colour to develop through mixing, absorption and chance. Browns move into swamp greens, deep blues appear almost black, while aubergine and dusty pink suggest bruising, discolouration and the marks left by trauma. The process is deliberately unstable: slight changes in pigment can produce entirely different tonal effects.

Landscape enters the work through memory and place. During a residency in Tulbagh, Czarnecki made ink paintings on fabric in response to the Groot Winterhoek mountains. These were later cut apart and reassembled into Twenty-Eight, turning a landscape image into a fragmented, reconstructed object.

Her upbringing in Saldanha Bay also surfaces in the exhibition. In Castaway, dusty pink tones recall the iron ore residue that has long settled across the industrial port town. The colour carries a double association: the blush of bruised flesh and the slow corrosion of rust. Across the exhibition, these two states — healing and erosion — remain in tension.

The physical transformation of the canvas is central to Czarnecki’s method. Once painted and dried, the calico is cut by hand into narrow strips along the warp. In works such as Collateral I and Collateral II, these strips are manipulated into loose, slouching forms that suggest drapery, anatomy and bodily distortion. In All Together Now I, II, III, the strips are packed tightly into moulds, creating a more compressed and rigid structure.

The title Range of Motion points to these changing states. Some works appear slack, others bent or tightly held. Surfaces carry traces of their earlier form even after they have been cut apart and rebuilt. Through this repeated process of staining, dissecting and reassembling, Czarnecki treats the canvas as something physical and mutable — a material capable of carrying both damage and repair.

Images courtesy of WHATIFTHEWORLD and Michelle Czarnecki.

Exhibition Details

24 October – 5 December 2026
WHATIFTHEWORLD
1st Floor, 16 Buiten Street
Cape Town

Opening

Saturday, 24 October 2026
10:00 – 13:00
WHATIFTHEWORLD
1st Floor, 16 Buiten Street, Cape Town