For Spring Nights, m.simons has invited David Jablonowski to develop an exhibition in dialogue with the presentation of Ido Vunderink, running throughout Offspring 2026, the graduation exhibition of De Ateliers. The invitation to Jablonowski stems from a shared interest in materiality, and from his distinct approach to the ways in which materials generate and carry narrative, both historically and in contemporary production. Equally central to the project is the encounter with Ido Vunderink’s practice, which, while operating within a more reduced field of painting and colour, similarly returns to fundamental questions of structure, perception, and material presence.
“Soft-Hard Commodity Fusion I and II” (2019) are positioned in the front space of the gallery. The two sculptures consist of layered materials that move between the readymade and the artist-made. Their bases are formed from organically shaped 3D-printed elements in gradient colors, giving them an almost digital or biomorphic presence. Resting on top are two identical structures, each composed of two Stainless steel plates connected at the top and opening outward at the bottom into an inverted V-shape. These elements carry a distinctly hi-tech aesthetic, further emphasized by the circular gold mirrors on which they stand. Thin polished brass rods suspended through the steel forms reinforce this atmosphere, evoking technological infrastructures, speculative machinery, or systems of computation.
This visual language of technology and industrial production is disrupted by the inclusion of two hayforks within the sculptures. The artist sourced these objects in Afghanistan, a region geographically close to the origins of some of the earliest accounting systems. Around 9,500 years ago, Sumerian societies across parts of present-day Iraq, Syria, and Iran developed cuneiform writing as a means of recording grain storage and trade, establishing systems of measurement and exchange that would ultimately shape the foundations of contemporary economies and computational logic.
The hayforks themselves, however, resist a purely historical reading. Their lacquered surfaces remain intact, almost synthetic in appearance, and the objects feel unmistakably contemporary, as though still embedded within present-day cycles of labor and production. Rather than constructing a linear narrative about the history of accounting or technology, the works bring together materials, temporalities, and modes of production that collapse distinctions between the archaic and the futuristic. In doing so, the sculptures reflect on the persistent role of commodities as both material goods and abstract carriers of value — entities through which systems of labor, trade, technology, and power continue to circulate.
In the back space of the gallery, Jablonowski presents a group of recent two-dimensional works alongside two sculptural objects that use stone as their primary material. Within the artist’s practice, stone and marble often function as a counterweight to the industrial and technological associations carried by materials such as aluminium, brass, and plastic. This tension becomes particularly visible in the juxtaposition of ultra-flat aluminium elements against the granite obelisk, where seemingly timeless materials encounter the aesthetics of precision manufacturing and digital production.
The paintings are among the artist’s most recent works. Consisting of oil paint on plaster mounted on board, they originated from an ongoing research into Italian Renaissance painting. Through contemporary imaging technologies and the accessibility of high-resolution online archives, it has become possible to examine historical paintings at an almost microscopic level. Jablonowski became particularly interested in the unexpectedly rough and physical surfaces of works by painters such as Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca and Giovanni Bellini, discovering fingerprints, scratches, and traces of manual handling embedded within the paint. Much like in the sculptures, elements in plastic, brass, and cnc-milled aluminium are mounted onto the painted surfaces, collapsing distinctions between image and object.
* This exhibition is placed within the presentation of Ido Vunderink, for more information on that presentation, please visit this link.
