My practice explores how memory becomes embedded in objects, spaces, and structures through displacement and transience. Working in sculpture, architecture, and installation, I investigate the material traces we leave behind—transforming past experiences into raw materials.

Growing up on the edge of the Bavarian Forest with a migrant background, I developed an intimate awareness of how place and movement inform one's sense of home, positioning my work at the threshold between personal history and collective experience. My recent projects map architectures of transition and provisional dwelling.

Almsboxes uses everyday containers as sealed spaces holding memories and abandoned objects. Structures of Existence presents metal frameworks housing ceramics, ready-mades, and digital technology, examining how we create meaning through architectural systems. Exhausted Ghosts employs large-scale rubbings of urban surfaces combined with reconstructed home fragments of places I inhabited, documenting thresholds as archaeological evidence of passage. By combining moving boxes, construction materials like concrete, everyday objects, and immaterial elements like water, sound, and light, I create sculptural assemblages that reveal the precarity underlying seemingly stable structures. The process of excavation and re-performance exposes how memory and identity are constantly shifting and externalized in materials.

Drawing from Post-Minimalism and Gordon Matta-Clark's architectural interventions, my Eastern European background instilled a resourcefulness that manifests in purposeful play with contradicting materials—concrete against sound, permanence against ephemerality—where wounded forms expose fragility and the need for care. After working across Germany and Switzerland, my practice has evolved toward investigating the invisible architectures of displacement. My current work explores how an archaeology of desires and past intentions translates into man-made systems, revealing their inherent vulnerability, fragility, and need for care and healing.

August '26 po

Patrick Ostrowsky (b.1991 Schwandorf) is an Austrian-German sculptor and installation artist based in Munich. His practice centres on memory, displacement, and the material residues of inhabited spaces — taking form primarily as 1:1 skeletal wooden reconstructions of apartments he has personally lived in. These works, gathered under the title Exhausted Ghosts and Storage Problems, strip domestic space down to its structural logic, making absence physically present.

Alongside these, his Almsboxes series examines objects of religious collecting as carriers of social control and suppressed care, and a newer body of work, The Bedroom Shows, investigates the threshold between private and public space through sculpture, performance, and installation.

Ostrowsky studied at the Institute Art Gender Nature, FHNW Basel, graduating in 2023, and subsequently as a Meisterschüler under Prof. Florian Pumhösl at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München. He is represented by Britta Rettberg gallery, Munich, where a solo exhibition is forthcoming in September 2026.

His work has been presented at Kunsthaus Baselland, Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Cité internationale des arts Paris, and Sculpture Park Cobertizo, Jilotepec, Mexico, among other venues. He has held residencies at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris, and is a confirmed resident at ISCP New York in 2027.

2026