There are moments when the steady current of experience suddenly stops — when memory, sensation, or meaning refuses to move forward and instead gathers, pools, and holds still. It is in these moments of unexpected pause that Yuri Leiderman finds his subject.

Stopping the Flows marks the artist's first solo exhibition in Warsaw, and his first presentation with the gallery — a significant occasion in a practice spanning more than four decades. Born in Odessa and formed within the vital circle of Moscow Conceptualism in the 1980s, Leiderman has worked across painting, writing, performance, and installation, always returning to the same restless conviction: that art is not a delivery of meaning, but a place where meaning gets complicated, slowed down, and made strange.

At the heart of this exhibition lies a tension between two opposing forces — ornament and expression. Expression is intimate and unrepeatable, the kind of mark or gesture that could only have come from one person, in one moment. Ornament is its opposite: pattern, repetition, the rhythms we share and inherit. On the surface they might seem complementary, but Leiderman sees them as quietly at war. Each one undermines the other. When pattern takes over, the personal voice fades. When raw expression pushes through, the pattern breaks apart. What remains is something in between — uncertain, a little clumsy, and surprisingly moving.

This is where, for Leiderman, art actually lives: not in mastery or resolution, but in the moment of exhaustion, when one force has worn the other down and something unplanned is left behind. Stopping the Flows invites us to slow down alongside the work — to notice what accumulates when the current finally stills.