Joanna Piotrowska
BURROWED

From 10 November 2026 to 24 January 2027, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi presents BURROWED, Joanna Piotrowska’s first solo exhibition at an Italian institution. Conceived specifically for the Project Space at Palazzo Strozzi and curated by Leonardo Bigazzi, the exhibition brings together a new body of work exploring the tensions between intimacy and control, vulnerability and resistance, protection and oppression.  

Working across photography and other image-based forms, Piotrowska’s practice investigates the psychological and social dynamics embedded in everyday life, with particular attention to the ways bodies, spaces, and relationships can become sites of negotiation, tension, and transformation. 

The title BURROWED evokes an inward movement, the carving out of a secluded place that offers protection and shelter. Through photography and collage, Piotrowska’s works inhabit a space of unresolved psychological intensity, each image poised at the threshold of an event, holding a sense of suspended potential. Her practice often probes beneath the familiarity of ordinary gestures, domestic spaces, and interpersonal relationships, revealing their more ambiguous structures. To burrow is intended here not simply as an act of retreat or concealment, but as an artistic process through which Piotrowska digs into accumulated layers of personal archives, images, memories and associations, bringing them together to form unexpected constellations of meaning.  

Presenting fragments of a broader narrative, the exhibition draws a parallel with the psychoanalytic process, in which meaning emerges through the interpretation of partial and often resistant material that does not initially form a coherent whole, such as dreams, memories, and gestures. As with our perception of reality, the construction of meaning is itself fragmentary. Piotrowska’s works invite viewers to participate actively in this process of interpretation: an ongoing act of construction, constantly negotiated and called into question. 

The exhibition Joanna Piotrowska. BURROWED is promoted and organized by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. Public Supporters: Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Camera di Commercio di Firenze. Private Supporters: Fondazione CR Firenze, Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, Comitato dei Partner di Palazzo Strozzi. Thanks to: Consonni Radziszewski (Lisbon, Milan, Warsaw).