Zurich – Read These Leaves: Maria Kozak

Maria Kozak's exhibition takes its title from her favorite passage of Leaves of Grass, in which Walt Whitman offers a philosophy for living as an embodied practice of openness, curiosity, and ethical attention. In Whitman's poem the 'leaves' refer to pages of a book. He urges us to unlearn what has been accepted without question and suggests that genuine wisdom comes from trusting one's own experience and the quiet truth that rises from within.

Knowledge is not found solely in books but in the living language of the body. Every text, including the one we write for ourselves, should remain alive, inviting continual reflection and reinterpretation. In Read These Leaves, this spirit extends to the image. Kozak's "leaves" are paintings, tapestries and drawings, each ambiguous tableaus waiting to be interpreted and assigned meaning unique to the viewer.

For Kozak, the title thus also recalls the practice of reading tea leaves, or tasseography—a contemplative form of divination in which images are discovered in the residue left behind.

Rather than relying on fixed symbols, tasseography depends on intuition, patience, and the human capacity to recognize patterns within ambiguity. It is less about predicting the future than cultivating a way of seeing.

Kozak's paintings emerge through a similar process of pareidolia or Rorschach—the tendency to perceive familiar forms within abstraction. Figures, animals, botanical forms, and landscapes emerge from shapes, gestures, and layers of paint before dissolving back into them. The artist does not fully determine these images in advance; instead, she enters into a dialogue with the material, responding to what begins to reveal itself. Painting becomes an act of reading as much as making.

Like Whitman's poems, Kozak's works do not seek to deliver a single message. Instead, they cultivate a mode of attention rooted in observation, imagination, and the willingness to remain receptive to what exceeds language. Looking becomes an act of inquiry rather than confirmation. The paintings ask us to embrace uncertainty and remind us that meaning is not simply found but continuously made through the act of looking.