Marcin Dudek

The Passage — 1080, 2020

Merino wool
25 x 250 cm
9 7/8 x 98 3/8 in
Edition of 30 plus 5 artist's proofs

Limited edition scarf in Merino wool based on Dudek’s 2020 painting, titled Passage.

In Passage, three black bomber jackets are stacked like carvings on a totem pole. Arms outstretched, their interiors create an orange strip that splits the composition into two halves as the familiar garment recalls people, places, and the escalation of violence during events the artist attended in the 1990s. Once part of a uniform, here the jacket is a container for memories, a metaphor of an individual swept into the wave of an increasingly explosive crowd. Orange is not an accidental color. It’s appearance in the stadium was a ritual foreshadowing of violence, a sign that things were about to get hot. A younger Dudek was one of many Polish football supporters who would turn their jackets inside out as full sections of the stadium suddenly shifted from dark colors into a sea of turbulent orange that would erupt into violence.

Equally essential to the supporter’s uniform is the scarf. They too represent the immersion of the individual into the collective and become an identity marker clearly indicating both the club its wearer belongs to and all the encoded associations this entails. For this edition, Dudek intentionally stayed away from the all too literal reference to the football scarf and instead chose to transmit the work’s visual qualities and energy into a design in high-quality Merino wool, realised in collaboration with Knitwear Lab.