The Sadness Planet uses blue glass fragments—color universally associated with melancholy—to represent collective grief during 2020's isolation, loss, and uncertainty. Collected during COVID quarantine when sadness became shared global experience, the work transforms street debris into memorial for unprecedented collective mourning. The planetary form suggests sadness as pervasive, surrounding us like atmosphere, yet Gerliczki's act of gathering, assembling, and photographing fragments implies creative response to despair—making art from brokenness as form of emotional processing and healing.
 
Zoltan depicts a broken planet alongside 13 other “planets” based on the most common human feelings or behaviors, such as happiness, sadness, anger, anticipation, fear, loneliness, jealousy, disgust, trust, greed, joy, racism, and shame.
In these images, the artist works with various fragments of colored glass and other debris that he collected from the streets near his home in Atlanta during the COVID-19 quarantine and political protests. Zoltan assembles these pieces in his studio and re-photographs them to symbolize the current crisis of political and environmental problems. At this moment, the most pressing issues of our time concern ourselves and the future of our culture and our planet. In a sense, the artist takes the pieces and puts them back together to reconstruct a fragmented world.
“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who do nothing about it.” -Albert Einstein
 
The Sadness Planet memorializes 2020 collective grief—blue glass fragments from quarantine transformed into sphere of shared melancholy. Archival pigment print from The Broken Planet. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.