MYSTERIES

Mysteries draw us inward, opening a portal of initiation and guiding us down into the depths – not to keep us there, but to bring about transformation in the here and now. The initiate emerges altered, even though they cannot foresee the nature of that change when the journey begins. Mysteries are both thrilling and risky – they call for the courage to undergo radical, often unexpected, transformation.

Mikołaj Sobczak’s mysteries lead us into an esoteric journey in which time becomes relative. Standing along a temporal axis, we travel into the past to find what feels surprisingly familiar. At the same time, the artist reveals a continuity of experience shared by people of a particular sensibility – regardless of the era in which they have encountered the world.

Theosophy, anthroposophy, and archeosophy appear here directly. They follow one another historically while sharing elements rooted in the past – in ancient myth, alchemy, and hermetic symbolism. The exhibition brings together collectible objects – esoteric works from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, archival materials and items connected to the history of esoteric groups from the artist’s own collection, but also – and perhaps above all – works shaped by his own experiences and practices.

The seven-piece cycle Anti-planets portrays scenes from the life of a member of the secret Order of the Egyptian Rite of Ancient Mysteries. It not only draws on themes found in early twentieth-century esoteric art and extends them conceptually, but also negotiates meaning, grounds experience in the realities of the twenty-first century, and plays with shifting contexts. Ritual and the sacred, mystery and ceremony, trance and emotion, body and spirit form complementary dimensions, joined by what is exoteric and esoteric, public and private, serious and irreverent. These dimensions interpenetrate and balance one another.

A mystery need not be solemn or austere – it can be outrageously lively. The artist calls upon the grandeur of an age-old tradition only to give the viewer a knowing wink – with the third eye. Contemporary works rooted in archeosophy enter into dialogue with earlier theosophical and anthroposophical art, revealing that a mystery is not a sealed ritual of the past but a living experience – pulsating, ambiguous, at times ironic. The spiritual meets the sensual. Meditation is complemented by provocation.

Mysteries do not ask what holiness is, but how it can be lived today – between seriousness and laughter, the elevated and the everyday, between light and shadow. Despite the sweep of historical and social change, we continue to confront the same shadow – but first comes the light, the core ideas that form the axis of the esoteric imagination within these traditions.

- dr Karolina Maria Kotkowska