About
Tate Modern is getting bigger. A corporate-style video on the ground floor informs me that the ‘Project’ will include ‘an urban plaza’ and ‘a fabulous restaurant’. The first thousand visitors will get an inflatable day-glo rabbit signed by Jeff Koons. I made that last bit up, or maybe I didn’t, but not the first. To which I can only respond: the intimacy and congeniality of Natalia’s studio, whose human scale (6 by 2.3 metres; the Tate’s turbine hall is 152 metres long and 35 high) encourages playfulness without any loss of discrimination, have never been more necessary or welcome.
Charles Boyle - CBeditions
Studio Ex Purgamento is one of the most exciting things in London: a professional gallery, inside an amazing flat where almost every object is either a work of art or an amazing trouvée. You have to know about it to know it's there, and when you go in it's like entering another world. The exhibitions are real events, and feature performance, literature, made objects and pictures. And the art is the real thing. Ex Purgamento is a gem.
Katy Evans-Bush - Baroque in Hackney
About Studio Ex Purgamento:
Ex Purgamento is a small gallery inside a private apartment in Camden Town, London owned by Natalia and Simon Zagorscy-Thomas. Since 2012 Natalia has been curating several shows a year on chosen themes, interpreted in different media by international artists. The emphasis is on showing work of Polish and other foreign artists alongside their British colleagues.
About Natalia Zagorska-Thomas:
Natalia Zagorska-Thomas was born in Warsaw, Poland. She studied fine art at the Canberra School of Art and Sydney College of Arts in Australia. After moving to London in the late 1980’s she graduated from Central St. Martins School of Art and Design in London, with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. Since then she has worked as an artist, stage and costume designer and jeweller.
In 2004 she received an MA in Textile Conservation from the Textile Conservation Centre, Winchester. She has worked as a freelance textile conservator at various institutions including the Royal Academy, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of London, Wawel Royal Castle in Krakow, the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, Zenzie Tinker Textile Conservation in Brighton and Buckingham Palace.
"As a visual artist I always start with an existing object. I don’t really feel like an author of the final piece, more a pair of hands which help to bring about its emancipation from daily servitude. I like the tension between this organic, intuitive process and my other life as an art conservator, which relies on hard, verifiable fact, where the ideal result is to stop time and eliminate change. So I spend half my time treating objects as forensic evidence and the other trying to prove that they are wholly unreliable. "