Oskar Zięta, with his sculptural interpretations of steel, is exhibiting at Giardina 2023, one of Europe’s leading indoor garden events. Among the most challenging creative solutions, four of Zięta’s metal sculptures will cocreate a green space, accompanying visitors’ strolls.
Giardina Zürich 2023
Messe Zurich, Zurich Exhibition Hall
15 to 19 March 2023
Constant movement
Gardens tend to be an asylum of inner peace. Today, when nature is becoming a luxury good, we want to keep those spaces exceptional. Besides their own narrative, Zięta’s pieces reflect and temper the surroundings. Thanks to the exclusive features of high-polished steel, the surface of the sculptures become a massive mirror with a frame of its essence of form.
Nature is constant movement—visible and invisible changeability and adaptability. Throughout his explorations in the fields of engineering and art, Oskar Zięta treats bionics as a leading source of fascination. A manifesto of bionics is the complex ANTROPOD sculpture, a concept based on movement. It reflects its every phase, fluidity, and repetition—an analysis of how motion was translated into the operation of a virtual model. Multiplication of the phases of movement enabled creation of an infinite number of forms with different dynamics. The moment of freezing becomes an artistic creation.
Art of technology
An anthropic fusion of human progress and speed is framed in advanced technological solutions. Flat pieces of metal are translated into the language of parametric programming. The assigned concepts are transformed into successive iterations, proposals of spatial forms with different centres of gravity and different dynamics. They are an effect of multiple attempts resulting in expanding interpretative possibilities. Concepts do not result from the passive use of a computer to open a sketch. The designer is the initiator of the idea, and the results of the search arise from a trust in generative algorithms, randomness, and computational power optimizing the final shape of the sculpture.
Once the parametrics are concluded comes the time for the sculptor to reach for the chisel. In Zięta’s hands, carving is performed in FiDU, the proprietary, internationally acclaimed technology of free deformation by internal pressure (from the German Freie Innendruck Umformung). Steel profiles are laser-cut and tightly joined to create 2.5D flat forms, which are then deformed into three-dimensional objects by injecting air. Zięta calls this process a “controlled loss of control,” because on one hand the parameters are defined by the creator, but when pumped the material maintains its freedom to self-deform. At Giardina 2023 the FiDU manifestos are presented in unobvious shapes:
SAIL, a three-dimensional piece of deformed steel drifting on the tides of interpretation.
NYMPH, an imagination-stirring sculpture that inscribes teardrop-shaped profiles in a metaphorical twisting. This is a renewed design challenge in Oskar Zieta’s proprietary FiDU technology. The tapering base is an open-ended study of axial stabilization and continued exploration of the potential of internal pressure forming of steel. As befits a mythical creature, NYMPH easily blends in with the natural landscape, gardens, and greenery. The steel, openwork, shiny construction multiplies the surroundings on its surface. It gives the space a mysterious, unique expression.
TOTEM, a multidimensional, geometrical interpretation of crystals shaped into a modern totem pole.
