Like a biology lab run by a Surrealist, Cindy Kolodziejski’s studio in Venice, California demonstrates the mind of the artist at her most provocative. Born in 1962 in Augsburg, Germany, Kolodziejski is known for her fusions of two-dimensional imagery with Duchampian three-dimensional objects she has found, modified, or created. Her integration of these disparate elements can be so seamless that, according to David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times, “It’s hard to distinguish between the found and the fabricated.” The artist’s materials vary wildly, and include painted earthenware surfaces, embroidered fabrics, glassware, laboratory equipment and all manner of readymade objects, which she laughingly admits to searching for on sites such as eBay. Despite her deep roots in the world of ceramics, having studied under Ralph Bacerra during her undergraduate work at Otis and then with Tony Marsh at Long Beach, Kolodziejski has found an expansive freedom in her diverse sourcing of materials. Her subjects range just as widely, although over the course of 20 years Kolodziejski has maintained a distinctive mixture of anatomical, botanical, figurative, and text-based imagery. Indeed, it is not so much the specific themes with which she engages that distinguish her work, but her idiosyncratic and often jarring juxtapositions of elements. Kolodziejski first attracted critical attention in the 1990s, for works that transposed often suggestive imagery and social commentary onto more traditional vessel forms. As time passed, her forms have become increasingly original, as demonstrated by her Specimens series, which include vintage laboratory equipment and her Portraits of Sorts and Curiosities, a collection of small-scale framed works. Cindy Kolodziejski’s work is internationally represented in major museum collections, such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Museum of History in Taipei, Taiwan. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in the United States for over 20 years.