Galleries

• 1. Biuro Wystaw / Fundacja Polskiej Sztuki Nowoczesnej

  Non–human times
  Katarzyna Górna
  1.10–30.11.2020
  Mon–Sat 12–18
  Sun open by appointment
  Krakowskie Przedmieście 16/18, apt. 4

  Map →
  www.biurowystaw.pl

  

  Katarzyna Górna
  Boydog #1, 2019-2020, analog photography, digital montage, courtesy of the artist and Biuro Wystaw / Fundacja Polskiej Sztuki Nowoczesnej

  Inhuman time is an exhibition of Katarzyna Górna’s works which forms a brace between the works created in the 90s; associated for critical art tendency, with her contemporary pieces of art. Nude bodies are often depicted in black and white photographs from her early artistic period, but now these pieces of art are confronted with the apocalyptic vision of human/man in post-pandemic times.

  By combining various forms of living creatures in photographic collages, the artist reduces a distance between the species. In addition, via exploring the world of inhuman beings, artist considers the boundaries of nature and culture, which are set by ourselves. In the new project, hybrid creatures (Górna called them symbiotes) break these boundaries of species through changing the perception of the human body in relation to other beings such as animals, robots, pants, or fungi.

  Katarzyna Górna is a representative of critical art tendency; originated in the 1990s, which was characterized by a critical view of economic transformation, as well as political and moral reality, in which artists often took up overlooked social issues. Hence at the beginning of her work, from the female perspective Górna looks at social reality and symbolic forms of the functioning of the woman’s image in culture. Thus in her artistic output with a distinctly feminist trait, it is easy to realize the evolution of thoughts, the transition from researching the area of creating cultural symbols to a more specific, contending, and postulating attitude. Apart from the reflection of her own gender’s position, she rather deconstructs the dominant masculinity.

  
  
  

• 2. BWA Warszawa

  Amalgamate
  Sławomir Pawszak
  kuratorka / curator: Monika Cejkova
  01.10–28.11.2020
  Open: Wed–Fri 2–6 p.m., Sat 12–4 p.m.
  Address: Marszałkowska 34/50/666

  Map →
  www.bwawarszawa.pl

  

  Sławomir Pawszak
  Untitled, 2019, glazed ceramics, 25,5x25,5x4cm

  Over the last two decades, various tendencies and experiments have appeared in the area of painting attempting to reflect the phenomenon of the internet, the existence of virtual reality, and social media. Together, these efforts have, in the end, put to rest the myth that painting as a medium has become outdated and extinct. This is another development in our relationship with paintings that has been transforming in the long term as a result of new technologies.

  Although Sławomir Pawszak’s art practice remains traditional in its physical presence, such as painted canvases, stretched on frames or experiments with objects and installations suspended in the gallery. At the same time, it is a complex contemplation of the perception of the image and its role in our contemporary digitalized world, where it is impossible to ignore the increasing amount of time we spend looking at visual content on our monitors or smartphone displays. Pawszak comes to terms with the overproduction of digital images, and reacts to their flat and superficial nature as well as the visual sphere of the internet in general. He finds various images online, downloading and saving them into folders to use as an endless source of second-hand visuals – with synthesis and various computer effects, he reworks them into his paintings.

  The exhibition entitled Amalgamate in BWA Warszawa will not only focus on Pawszak’s new paintings, it will also present his identically themed ceramic objects on the façade of the MDM urbanistic complex in Marszałkowska Street. The installation is inspired by the ceramic reliefs placed in high-rise housing estates under Socialism in the former Eastern Bloc.

  Monika Čejková

  
  
  

• 3. Dawid Radziszewski

  Tatjana Danneberg
  1–31.10.2020
  Open: Tue–Sat 12–6 p.m
  Adress: Kolejowa 47a/U5

  Map →
  www.dawidradziszewski.com

  

  Tatjana Danneberg
  Nuda, 2020, ink-jet print, gesso, glue on canvas, 140x210 cm, courtesy of LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina

  Tatjana Danneberg uses photographs as the basis for her works. Not photos randomly chosen from her iPhone roll. They are made intentionally, sometimes with an analog camera, maybe lo-fi aesthetics. What’s captured on them is nothing in particular really – blurred memories, little moments caught in between important events, some sort of memory stuffing. Danneberg scales them up and prints on transfer foil that she paints in gesso. Once it’s dried she wets it again to stick it to the canvas. The final shape is known once the foil is removed. What is left is a fragmentary image made out of the obscure non-memories, tracked by the brush strokes left by the glue binder.

  
  
  

• 4. ESTA

  Language Of Image/Image Of Language
  Andrzej Dłużniewski, Stanisław Dróżdż, Wanda Gołkowska, Jarosław Kozłowski
  1–10.10.2020
  Open: Thu–Sun 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
  Address: Aleje Jerozolimskie 51 (Bolesław Biegas Museum)

  Map →
  www.galeria-esta.pl

  

  Wanda Gołkowska
  Collection Earth X/71, 1971, marker/paper, 59x42 cm, courtesy of ESTA Gallery

  As we learn from Marshall McLuhan, the means of expression itself is information. The imagery we come across in our everyday lives – mass media, store displays, advertisements, etc. communicate with us. On the other hand, is a text not, first and foremost, an image? Printed in black, divided into separate blocks, it is also an element of image visuality. Could it be a coincidence that Stanisław Dróżdż’s private library contained a collection of texts by this prominent media expert? Dróżdż’s artistic output clearly evidences that language boils down to image and vice versa.

  But what of the agency of language, its performative power to shape reality? As jointly established by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari “Language is not life, it gives life orders”. One would be hard pressed to find reference to this notion in Dróżdż’s works, he considered himself a poet, his medium was pure word.

  An entirely different perspective was adopted by Antoni Dłużniewski in his cycle Rodzaj i cień [Gender and Shadow] wherein he reflected disparities between the meaning of words, their grammatical gender in various languages, and their impact on iconography. Rather than strive to identify the cause, he simply recognized the existence of said disparity and its consequences. Jarosław Kozłowski perceives the political machinery of oppression hidden behind the layer of meanings. His work entitled Zielone przedmioty [Green Objects] is to be an expression of his objection to the practice of trapping imagery in the network of meaning and its resulting politicization.

  Wanda Gołkowska started working on her cycle Kolekcja Ziemia [Earth Collection] in the 1970s.

  The artist created spherical shapes by transcribing the word Earth in various languages. However, it was not an act of naming with the view of subjecting nature to human rule, but rather an expression of her concern for biological life itself. Gołkowska expressed this notion directly, saying: “ The Earth may become a thing of the past. We must protect the notion of Earth”.

  
  
  

• 5. Foksal Gallery Foundation

  Wages for Housework
  Paulina Ołowska, Agata Słowak, Natalia Załuska
  1.10–21.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Sat 12–6 p.m.
  Address: Górskiego 1A

  Map →
  www.fgf.com.pl

  

  Paulina Ołowska
  Wages for Housework, 2020, 'found image' photo, 18x13 cm, courtesy of the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation

  This story begins in a secret, ecstatic salon: aggression is closer to kisses here – it’s quite gruesome – but it’s also close to home. Violence against another person, their body, skin folds, nails, and hair follicles, but also their words and gestures, has to be confronted with a piercing silence. This destructive power – not necessarily physical – is also bound up with absence. Disappearance, solitude, emptiness are moments of transformation. Jerking, scratching, or biting are the beginning, but also an end, a wane. Someone, who is in us so strongly, may be absent, but may also stay forever. They may manifest themselves in thousands of ways: in razor-thin scratches on the walls, in blood behind the baseboards, in wisps of hair tangled into window sills.

  Passion, desire lead in some degree to libertine pleasures, where violence can turn into ecstasy. Couches, sofas, and beds conceal an indefinite energy that pulls the two sides to itself as they hide their real desires from each other. This domestic arena becomes a rupture where stories of violence and fear accumulate. At the same time, the outside world loses its significance, leading only to disappointment. Pain does not ennoble anymore, does not deprecate the senses, but shows a specific, living matter. Courage requires opening up, breaking off the threads of passivity with their delusion that love is a form of violence. Suffering, the daily condition, is not a token of weakness, but an element that has built the modern world. Quite like in Silvia Federici’s manifesto – it is the highest price to be paid for believing in the power of essence, but also the painting…

  Marta Kudelska

  
  
  

• 6. Profile Foundation

  From A to B
  Ryszard Waśko
  1–30.10.2020
  Open: Tue–Sat 12–7 p.m.
  Address: Franciszkańska 6

  Map →
  www.fundacjaprofile.pl

  

  Ryszard Waśko
  Self-portrait with grey and black line, 1975

  The intermedia work of Ryszard Waśko encompasses activities in various media: film, video, video installation, photography, drawing and painting. The artist’s works from the 1970s show his participation in neo-avant-garde experiments and his rebellion against traditionally understood art. The analytical themes of his artistic practice were developed in pieces created during his activities in the Film Form Workshop. The extensive set of photographs presents the artist’s innovative search for ways to visualise movement and space. The problem of the reliability of film and photographic recordings, especially the relationship between reality and its visual representation, finds various interpretations in the series of video installations.

  The artist’s set of early films offers insights into experiments with framing, editing, sound, and film tape manipulation. Pioneering video art productions expose the relationship between the body and the medium treated as an extension of human activity.

  The selection of works emphasises the interpenetration of various media in Ryszard Waśko’s artistic practice, who in photography analysed movement and time characteristic of the language of film, while in film, he used static frames characteristic of photography. Large-format pieces that combine various media, from two series never before shown in Poland, illustrate the intermedia aspect of his work: Hypothetical Photography (1977) and Hypothetical Film (1979).

  The narrative of the exhibition includes photographs from the early 1980s, which are a record and commentary on political events and the accompanying social emotions.

  
  
  

• 7. HOS Gallery

  Interpenetration of Time
  Roma Hałat
  1.10–7.11.2020
  Open: Thu–Sun. 12–7 p.m.
  Wed-Fri. 12– 7 p.m., Sat 12-4 p.m.
  Address: Dzielna 5

  Map →
  www.hosgallery.pl

  

  Roma Hałat
  Meditation from the series Triads, 2003, mixed media, acrylic on paper, 100x70 cm (detail), courtesy of artist’s family

  Interpenetration of Time
  Roma Hałat

  Interpenetration of Time is the title of a series of works by a Łódź-based artist Roma Hałat (1937-2012), who painted even columns of lines and shapes on pastel-coloured tissue paper. Referring in their form to a book page, the ephemeral works seem to deal with the phenomena such as the transitoriness of time and the intricate vicissitudes of life.

  The exhibition at the HOS gallery is the first major presentation of Hałat’s art outside Łódź. The exhibition will feature works from the series: Landscapes – monochrome painting compositions from the 1970s, Shadow’s Life – drawings in which the artist captured the shadow of her moving hand when she was working, and An epitaph for a poet – minimalist compositions dedicated to poet Stanisław Grochowiak.

  Also presented will be Triads, reliefs created since 1985 and considered to be a kind of integration of concepts and fascinations with various forms of artistic expression, previously dispersed on canvases and diary pages. Triads are compositions that consist of three layers, each treated in a different way, covered with the artist’s characteristic handwriting (written backwards), with personal reflections and fragments of works; subsequent layers dotted with intricate drawings, or evenly covered with paint. Next, the artist cut small holes, revealing subsequent elements of the composition and leaving the final effect to chance.

  Roma Hałat’s art still remains undiscovered. The exhibition aims to bring out the artist’s oeuvre from oblivion – it was paradoxically diverse and extremely coherent, but also mysterious and timeless.

  
  
  

• 8. HOS Gallery

  Shaman Woman
  Si On
  1–4.10.2020
  Thu–Sun 11–19
  Mysia 3 (3rd floor)

  Map →
  www.hosgallery.pl

  

  Si On
  Provocateur, 2014, mixed media, satin and silicone on canvas, 203x142 cm, courtesy of artist

  Shaman Woman
  Si On

  Si On is a Korean artist who has been living and working in Poland for almost two years. Her monumental realizations embrace a multitude of experiences triggered by the need to find one’s place in different cultures. Each of the works manifests the intensity of experience, a wide spectrum of emotions repressed and denied on a daily basis.

  Sin On’s art embodies elements of compulsiveness, obsessiveness, and trauma controlled and tamed by the relentless labour of dexterous hands. Reliefs and installations hypnotize the viewer with the multitude of details and references. They are a metaphor of hope, anxiety and doubts woven out of twisted scraps of cloth, into which objects from the immediate surroundings are entwined like talismans.

  The intensity of the textures looking out and escaping the limiting two-dimensionality of the image, require interaction with the viewer. The complex compositions encapsulate negative emotions and deliberations over the condition of the modern world. The innovative technique of searing the surface meticulously woven out of hundreds of elements, makes destruction a creative and energy-giving act.

  The artist-shaman looks like a traveller between worlds, an intermediary between what is real and spiritual, between decay and life, sadness and joy. Evil and fear go through cleansing rituals and are domesticated in this way. Si On’s exhibition Shaman Woman organised in the space of the Mysia 3 centre will feature a dozen or so of the artist’s large-format works, giving Polish viewers an insight into her rich and diverse artistic output for the first time.

  
  
  

• 9. Fort Institute of Photography

  Abzgram
  Karolina Wojtas
  Curator: Rafał Milach
  1.10–29.11.2020
  Open: Wed–Fri 2–6 p.m., Sat–Sun 12–6 p.m.
  Address: Racławicka 99 (Fort Mokotów, Building 06)

  Map →
  www.instytutfotografiifort.org.pl

  

  Karolina Wojtas
  from the series Abzgram, 2017, photography, pigment print on archival paper
  

  “The Republics of the future depend on how their youth is raised…” This is a quote written on the wall of the J. Zamojski Academy. What is a Polish school? Anyone can see that clearly. We can hear Gombrowicz chuckle from beyond the grave. Why? Well, simply because not a lot has changed since his time… He may have battled with the “bum” and the “mug,” schematic ways of thinking, along the lines of Słowacki was a great poet… And he battled with the onslaught of “Form” that spreads its arms over the entire scope of schooling. He wanted for students to think, feel and judge for themselves. Did he manage to get his point across? Nope. Besides the fact that his works ended up on the margins, slated as superfluous and even dangerous for the youth… And here it’s not even about overloading the pupil with information, about the expectation that they ought to be geniuses at physics and chemistry, at math or the humanities. It’s not about backpacks that weigh a ton… It’s more about the fact that we often find ourselves, as the saying goes, “throwing the child out with the bathwater.” Because we end up losing track of what’s important, lost in the muddle of all that knowledge. What should schools be responsible for today? Not just education, but cultivating sensibility and an appreciation for literature, open critique, learning to live. The pupil is subject to a constant stream of scholarly consciousness. If we want to see a generation of people free from inhibitions, homophobia, if we want to raise a democratic society of tolerant individuals, open to a multiplicity of cultures, then we have to stop and consider – who will take care of our elders? What will our relations between friends and between family look like?

  
  
  

• 10. Jednostka

  Cliffhanger
  Weronika Gęsicka

  Zhenshchina
  Magda Hueckel
  1–17.10.2020

  Open: Tue–Sat 2–6 p.m.
  Address: Andersa 13

  Map →
  www.jednostka.com

  

  Weronika Gęsicka
  Untitled #1 from the Smash series, 2020, collage, 65x50 cm, courtesy the artist and Jednostka Gallery

  Cliffhanger
  Weronika Gęsicka

  Pausing the course of events. Keeping the feeling of excitement for as long as possible. Looking forward to the end of the story. Cliffhanger, or the suspension of a plot at a time of mounting tension, is a device invented for the needs of serialised novels – it has now spread into many other areas – in order to maintain people’s interest in a world where excess prevails. It incentivises us to wait for the next season of a TV series, to buy the next book in a series, or endure the long strings of commercials during a movie. Apparently, the sense of the unknown captivates and stirs the imagination. Yet, recently cliffhangers have permeated from the world of entertainment to the real world, and rather than being associated with excitement, the feeling of suspense and mystery arouses anxiety and frustration. We look forward to the end of the story, but when it comes, we hope for more plot twists.

  Cliffhanger consists of works from the latest projects of Weronika Gęsicka – Holiday, Cocoon and Smash, which are based on archival pictures from photo banks. They attempt to capture the tensions and fears that we have come to face nowadays. Inundated with news about emerging threats and not quite optimistic forecasts for the future, we begin to sense the end of reality as we know it. Scratches start to appear on the idyllic pictures that make up a large portion of our privileged world. We are no longer able to function in an artificially created reality where everything, from our image to the way we spend our leisure time, must be perfect. Weronika Gęsicka (born in 1984) Visual artist. Photography is the central focus of Gęsicka’s art. She also creates objects and artefacts. Her projects address topics related to memory, its mechanisms, and the related scientific and pseudoscientific theories. She often works with archival materials. A winner of many awards including Paszport Polityki Award for Visual Arts category (2019), EMOP Arendt Award (2019), Foam Talent (2017). Her works have been exhibited worldwide. Gęsicka’s works can be found in prestigious collections including Dom Museum Wien, Vienna, Austria; Arendt Collection, Luxemburg; MuFo Museum of Photography, Cracow, Poland; Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Germany.

  Zhenshchina
  Magda Hueckel
  1–17.10.2020

  The series of works is based on the book ‘Zhenshchina’ (transcription of the Russian word for ‘woman’), which Magda Hueckel found at an antiques market in Tbilisi. The author of the original ‘Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde’, published in 1885, was Hermann Heinrich Ploss, an anthropologist and gynaecologist, founder of modern paediatrics and gynaecology. The publication is a peculiar compendium of knowledge about women from around the world. It analyses various aspects of womanhood, such as anatomy, physiology, sexuality, social position, cultural role and the then prevailing traditions. The book has been reprinted twelve times in various languages and supplemented with numerous illustrations. 

  Being scientific in nature and considered progressive by the contemporaries, nowadays the nineteenth-century narrative causes distress, with the role of a woman reduced to procreative functions. The analysis of the female corporeality is intertwined with a socio-cultural study of traditions, superstitions and rituals. The book is lavishly illustrated with brutal scenes, depicting medical practices, pathologies and violent habits (death by burning, stigmatisation of widows, circumcision, scarification, amputation of breasts and fingers). The most perplexing, however, is the fact that many of the rituals and stereotypes described in the book have survived to this day.

  Magda Hueckel, fascinated by the archival images, deconstructs them. She is filling the empty pages of the book with manipulated images, creating her own – thirteenth – grotesque edition of the publication.

  
  
  

• 11. Le Guern

  Jurassic Garden
  C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska
  1.10–10.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Fri 12–6 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
  Address: ul. Katowicka 25/1

  Map →
  www.leguern.pl

  

  C.T. Jasper, Joanna Malinowska
  In Savage Society, 2019, mixed media, photo: Piotr Żagiell

  Jurassic Garden, an exhibition by two Polish-born, New York-based artists, C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska focuses on a series of large-scale woodcut prints.

  It is a sudden and very intentional detour in the work of the two artists who usually operate in the realm of new media and installation. A woodcut technique to an inexperienced woodcut-maker is like having one’s hand transformed into a bear paw or Yeti’s pad – incapable of subtlety and refinement. This unanticipated return to primal techniques is a way of processing the current and complex global situation, an attempt to reunite with the ordinary, everyday materials and methods of creation. An attempt to grasp and understand what is happening in front of our eyes through the imagery of Jurassic reptiles and the feeling that the fate of the world is out of our control. Jasper’s and Malinowska’s woodcuts are inspired by the iconography of early Japanese Godzilla films, mixed with the visions of Hieronymus Bosch and a punk-rock sense of anarchy. Fire and sulfur, glaring rays, and hisses. Scaled backs and monstrous tails.

  In addition to the two-dimensional works on paper, the gallery space, like a Platonic cave, is filled with sculptures of bone-fires (inspired by the freak incident of the Gdańsk Catholic priests burning books, Hello Kitty umbrellas and non-Western masks) and cardboard robots, inept versions of the more sophisticated ones from the sci-fi films, mindlessly bouncing around against the gallery walls and other obstacles.

  
  
  

• 12. LETO

  On the Emptiness of Fame and the Fleeting Taste of Wild Strawberries
  Wojciech Ireneusz Sobczyk
  1.10–28.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Fri 12–7 p.m., Sat 12–4 p.m.
  Address: Dzielna 5

  Map →
  www.leto.pl

  

  Wojciech Ireneusz Sobczyk
  Mask of Shame I, 2020, porcelain, cobalt oxide, glaze, 36x24x33 cm, courtesy of the artist and LETO

  The title of the exhibition hails back to one of the descriptive names of the painting by Hieronymus Bosch widely known by its common title — The Garden of Earthly Delights. The famous triptych was described as a “picture of a strawberry” by José de Sigüenza in 1605 in the annals of his monastery.

  In his characteristic manner, Sobczyk takes on this reference from the art of the past and draws from its rich iconography and symbolism to translate these themes into the contemporary context of corporality and desire. This is the foundation for this highly sensual project, in which beauty and passion are woven tightly together with suffering and sadism.

  The ornamental forms of the foliage and flowers are intrinsically linked to elements representing savage torture. The exhibition becomes a parable of the garden of glorious pain, while the entirety of the project takes on the character of a moral balance. Yet under this simplified idea, there is an array of covert approaches and behaviours that cannot be packed into the typical schema of good versus evil. One particular reference comes from the masks of shame, which are a visual depiction of punishment, as well as a physical weapon of torture that was inflicted on victims, obstructing their speech, breath and nourishment. Made by Sobczyk’s own hands out of porcelain and decorated with vibrant cobalt patterns, these objects become a physical symbols of fetish and desire. Setting these two themes alongside one another sets the stage for the artist to explore reflections on shame, desire, ecstasy and pain, which permeate liberally through the nature of humankind.

  
  
  

• 13. lokal_30

  The Camel Never Forgets
  Diana Lelonek, Anna Orbaczewska, Katarzyna Swinarska, Sofi Zezmer, Jan Możdżyński, Adelina Cimochowicz, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Dobromiła Hada-Jasikowska
  1.10–7.11.2020
  Open: Wed–Fri 12–6 p.m., Sat 12–3 p.m.
  Address: ul. Wilcza 29A/12

  Map →
  www.lokal30.pl

  

  Diana Lelonek
  Patki, 2019, photographic installation, 200x400 cm, courtesy of the artist and lokal_30

  The ancient people used to say: “the camel never forgets an injury”. But the camel’s memory is not unique in this respect – even unconsciously inflicted evil leaves a lasting trace in the psyche of the person or community that experiences it. Today, philosophers consider suffering a wrong in the categories of a profound violation of dignity, a sting that cannot be easily removed, and which may not only become stuck in the psyche of an individual, but can also be passed from generation to generation as a trauma. Inextricable from harm is also the pursuit of retribution – punishment meted out by the judiciary or else coping with the burden individually through reconciliation or revenge. Yet, many wrongs remain unsettled, not only due to the powerlessness of the victims, but also because ultimate reckoning is impossible, communities fail to recognise their wrongdoing or else a specific perpetrator cannot be determined if a certain collectivity is concerned.

  The exhibition The Camel Never Forgets is devoted to wrongs sanctioned by their acceptance in the social system. The best example of this mechanism is patriarchy, which has existed for so long and is so omnipresent that we did not notice (and often still fail to notice) its ethical aspects and impact on people’s attitudes to each other and non-human entities. Relations of power, greed and the belief that some are superior to others not only influence the fate of societies and communities, but also, above all, leave their mark on the private stories of individual persons and beings. The exhibition shows harm and violence through metaphors and intimate stories of living, dying out, harmed feelings or simply of ordinary situations beneath which violence and exploitation lurk.

  
  
  

• 14. m²

  Pustynia Piasek Susz [Desert Sand Drought]
  Igor Przybylski
  1.10–5.12.2020
  Open: Tue 2–7 p.m., Thu 2–9 p.m.,
  Fri 2–7 p.m., Sat 12–4 p.m.
  Address: Oleandrów 6

  Map →
  www.m2.art.pl

  

  Igor Przybylski
  Warkocz [Braid], 2020, acrylic, canvas; 30x100 cm, courtesy of m² Gallery

  The names of railway stations and stops, sometimes strange, often carrying additional meanings, are an element of a communication landscape that we tend to dismiss. They become a component of an unconscious linguistic game in which we, as travelers, participate in. When we get off in the town of Święta Katarzyna [St. Catherine], Piasek [Sand] or Bobry [Beavers], we do it as quickly as possible, for the only determinant at this point is our ticket’s validity. As we walk through the station’s run-down tunnels, dingy underground passages, meant for transporting us from the railway platform to the town’s center, we try to quickly escape the alien railway landscape. Inadvertently, we succumb to the process of a journey, from the moment we enter the departure station till we leave the premises of the destination station. We don’t pay attention to any of the “in-betweens”.

  The paintings and photographs are to draw attention to this overlooked, penultimate stage of the journey. The works shown at the exhibition are the result of my documentation of railway stations across Poland. The painted platform and station boards match the proportions, colors and lettering of the original. Photos of the underpasses, devoid of passengers, show the pure architectural fabric of these austere and unattractive places. People are absent. They leave behind them a trace, in the form of debris.

  
  
  

• 15. Monopol

  Leon Tarasewicz
  1.10–28.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Fri 12–7 p.m., Sat 12–4 p.m.
  Address: Marszałkowska 34/50

  Map →
  www.galeriamonopol.pl

  

  Leon Tarasewicz
  Untitled,, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 100x100 cm, courtesy of the artist and Monopol Gallery

  The maximisation of colour – this is a topic which Leon Tarasewicz has explored more deeply than any other contemporary artist in Poland. At the same time, this is a subject which cannot be exhausted, just as you cannot reach a place where the landscape ends, and see the whole light filling it.

  Nowadays, the consciousness of the climate emergency is forcing post-industrial societies to open their eyes to nature and rethink the position which people occupy in relation to it. Leon Tarasewicz has perceived the relationship with nature as a foundation of culture for decades, since the beginning of his creative career. This relationship also provides a basis for his painting. It is non-figurative imagery, exceeding the category of abstraction. Each of the paintings by Tarasewicz – irrespective of whether it is an easel picture or one of the immersive, spatial painting installations created by the artist – is based on what he observes. None depicts anything. In this painting, the picture’s surface is space, the rhythm is a structure for colours, while colour is a fruit of the meeting between matter and light. The compositions by Tarasewicz are open, because the world cannot be closed in a single scene; we always immerse ourselves in its fragments.

  The same applies to the latest pictures, in which Tarasewicz deals with the category of brightness. Do these works reverberate with the visual echo of the fields of tulips seen in the Netherlands by the artist? Or maybe it is about the flowers growing in Waliły, a village in Podlachia, which Tarasewicz made the centre of his universe. In actual fact, it is not important. The artist has never been occupied with showing places, but has thematised the human experience of colour in space. The imaging of colours, whose intensity and relationships with other colours enter the level of brightness, is among the riskiest challenges which an artist can explore in painting. At the same time, it is a risk worth taking; the experience of colour, touching euphoric chords, is at stake.

  
  
  

• 16. Naga

  Anger detracts from her beauty
  Weronika Perłowska
  1–14.10.2020
  Wed–Sat 2–7 p.m.
  Częstochowska 20
  [space provided by KARROT. Kawa i kultura]

  Map →
  www.instagram.com/galerianaga

  

  Weronika Perłowska
  Untitled from Anger detracts from her beauty series, 2019, archival pigment print 20x14 cm

  The saying “Anger detracts from (her) beauty” contains a threat equating ‘angry’* with ‘ugly’, where ugliness is the most derogatory characteristic one can attribute to a woman. A perception of woman’s anger as irrational, hysterical and plain ugly has a long history, starting with harpies, witches and Medusa, through instilling docility and obedience into ‘good and smiling’ girls, to ‘rabid feminist’ memes and the so-called ‘Resting Bitch Face’ syndrome. Albeit, socially, women’s anger becomes an instrument of political change, in an individual dimension, it often remains a shameful and concealed emotion. The most unbecoming of a woman is to rage in her own name. Perłowska’s pieces zoom in on anger in the most intimate, hidden in kitchens and bathrooms, seeking out its embarrassing proofs in family archives. The artist questions a validity of concealing emotions underneath aesthetic devices.

  *Polish makes this threat plain: ‘zła/zły’ means both ‘angry’ and ‘evil’, while the Polish version of the saying, “Złość piękności szkodzi”, spells out the detraction as outright harm.

  The event is organised by NAGA Gallery, partners: KARROT. Kawa i kultura and Krakow

  Photomonth

  
  
  

• 17. Olszewski Gallery

  Death of a Palm Tree
  Joanna Rajkowska
  1.10-31.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Fri 11 a.m.–2 p.m., 3–7 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.–4 p.m
  Address: Szpitalna 8a/6

  Map →
  www.olszewskigallery.com

  

  Joanna Rajkowska,
  Śmierć palmy, 2019, photography, 120x90 cm, Joanna Rajkowska

  Olszewski Gallery presents the first exhibition documenting Joanna Rajkowska’s public project, Death of a Palm Tree (2019). Through the display of large scale photographs and actual palm’s dead leaves, the exhibition provides an opportunity to encounter the work as a unique and politically urgent gesture wherein the artist’s early high-profile concerns with historic trauma meet her recent dedication to nonhuman agency.

  In 2003, the young and then-unknown Rajkowska directed the installation of an artificial palm tree in the center of Warsaw, a work she named, Greetings from Jerusalem Avenue. The tree occupied the site of an annually erected Christmas tree. In a hyper-localised action of critical memorialisation, the artist initiated the most iconic project in Warsaw’s public space since 1989. Greetings… was the first of a series of contested countermonuments that activated diff erent communities to engage in struggles over shared space and symbolic power. Rajkowska insists, works like Greetings are defined by their afterlives, thus it is of particular consequence that seventeen years later, she returned, materially, to the tree.

  The towering artificial palm tree fell deathly ill last year. Did city powers finally choke out the tree’s peculiar intervention, its monumental greeting? Or the tree has suff ered from its own radical disorientation, alone amidst the ceaseless urban palimpsest of mass deaths and mass births. And on top of all of these, perhaps the tree’s murderer is the total sum of modernity’s disregard for life. Yes, for this reason, in a familiar act of nonhuman warning, the palm tree died in 2019. Yes, for this reason, Rajkowska staged its temporary death.

  
  
  

• 18. Piktogram

  AMATEUR THREESOME
  Krystian Truth Czaplicki
  1.10–7.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Fri 12–7 p.m., Sat 12–4 p.m.
  Address: Kredytowa 9/1

  Map →
  www.piktogram.org

  

  Krystian Truth Czaplicki
  IT'S LIKE WOMB JUICE ALL OVER ME, 2020 Lacquered steel, mannequin, water transfer printing, beard (detail), courtesy of the artist and Piktogram Gallery

  Why, why, why?

  Why do you do it?

  Why? Why get up?

  Why keep fighting?

  Do you believe you’re fighting for something?

  For more than your survival?

  Can you tell me what it is?

  Do you even know?

  Is it freedom or truth?

  Perhaps peace?

  Could it be for love?

  Illusions, vagaries of perception.

  Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose.

  
  
  

• 19. Pola Magnetyczne

  Demonstration of Pictures
  Agata Bogacka
  1.10–14.11.2020
  Open by appointment
  Address: Londyńska 13

  Map →
  www.polamagnetyczne.com

  

  Agata Bogacka
  Divided View 2, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 80x100 cm, courtesy the artist and Pola Magnetyczne gallery, Warsaw

  For two years now, Agata Bogacka’s painting has taken a decidedly abstract direction, completely abandoning both figuration and anthropomorphic elements that were concisely present in her work until the opening of the artist’s previous exhibition at Pola Magnetyczne gallery (Relationship, 2018). The bodies of individuals entangled in social structures have already left the canvas scene for good, leaving behind the painting structure itself, a network of complex relations between geometric figures, layers of paint, colour planes and interpenetrating gradients. A series of eloquent painting titles – Negotiations, Relationship, Dependency, Opposition, Reconstruction, Head in the Clouds, Divided View, Unfinished View, Promises, Wishes, Expectations, Awakening or Equality Dream – show that the place from which the artist speaks today is situated on the line of balance that each of us should constantly build towards others or towards the world around us. The title of Agata Bogacka’s exhibition, Demonstration of Pictures, refers to a painting by Henryk Streng (later Marek Włodarski), which was created in the significant year of 1933. In her large canvases, as though they were banners (which, however, cannot be lifted, unlike in Włodarski’s case), and in her videos, the artist manifests the opaque nature of the world we find ourselves in today: dangerous radicalisation of political discourse, growing polarisation and antagonisation of social groups on religious or moral grounds in the times of the economic and epidemiological crisis of the early 2020s.

  
  
  

• 20. Polana Institute

  Napoleonka or Death
  Hanna Krzysztofiak
  1–18.10.2020
  Open: Mon–Sat 12–6 p.m.
  Address: al. Jana Pawła II 49

  Map →
  polana.institute

  

  Hanna Krzysztofiak
  The Storm, 2020, acrylic on canvas 200x175 cm

  Napoleonka or death
  Hanna Krzysztofiak

  Twisted gunges, “a fucked-up clock”, bed heads, devils, horses, ghosts, cafe curtains, a child’s tombstone. The motives from childhood and the adult world on the artist’s canvases are like intrusive thoughts in a stuffy room. Nobody is happy when they can’t sleep at 3 am, and time in lockdown isolation is similar to this 3 a.m. feeling. However, personal anxiety and fear are not the most important themes of Krzysztofiak’s paintings presented at the exhibition.

  Catherine Malabou in her essay To Quarantine from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe, and “I” quotes John James Rousseau’s Confessions to focus for a moment on the issue of choice. “What is best in a time of confinement? Be quarantined with other people? Or be quarantined alone?”. In the painting with a tombstone in the background, we see in the foreground sad skeletons of a girl and a dog. Getting familiar with the thought of one’s own end in a pandemic takes on a double meaning. If we live alone, we will no longer get a chance to “improve” in the eyes of society. A lonely woman in Poland in 2020 is a woman lacking in something and dies in infamy.

  These painting are not about female madness, although some part of this narration evokes the atmosphere of In the Heart of the Country by J.M. Coetzee. This is an attempt to create a universal danse macabre out of her own fears. Instead of a traditional procession of representatives of various walks of life, the artist is accompanied by kitschy objects and decorations “borrowed” from her own collection or the Internet or from the domesticated spaces of other people. The ugly placed in the role of the beautiful and desirable is a perfect tool for the symbolic revenge for nonverbalized wrongs. A horse with a giant triumphant smile standing on a corpse, or rather, a pile of dismembered corpses, probably Napoleon’s.

  
  
  

• 21. Polana Instytut

  The Kitchen
  Przemysław Branas, Felipe Cuartas, Martyna Czech, Weronika Gęsicka, Martyna Kielesińska, Hanna Krzysztofiak, Olga Micińska, Paulina Włostowska, Mikołaj Sobczak, Martha Rosler, Ryan Trecartin, Kinga Michalska
  1–4.10.2020
  Open: Thu–Sun 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
  Address: Clay. Warsaw Burdzinskiego 5

  Map →
  polana.institute

  

  Weronika Gęsicka
  Keep her where she belongs, 2018, 20x27x62 cm, nickel-plated steel, courtesy of the Artist and Jednostka Gallery, photo: Bartosz Górka

  The Kitchen
  Przemysław Branas, Felipe Cuartas, Martyna Czech, Weronika Gęsicka, Martyna Kielesińska, Hanna Krzysztofiak, Olga Micińska, Paulina Włostowska, Mikołaj Sobczak, Martha Rosler, Ryan Trecartin, Kinga Michalska
  Forty-five years after The Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler’s breakthrough work that parodied Julia Child’s culinary TV programs from the 1960s, Polona presents The Kitchen, a collective exhibition at Clay.Warsaw. The focal points of the exhibition are three kitchens connected to the main hall, an ideal setting for a contemporary culinary TV program. There is also an additional, fourth kitchen – an installation by Martyna Kielesińska.

  For centuries, the kitchen has been a site of domestic violence, but it is also a place where rebellion is born. It is no coincidence that the famous South American cacelorazo, a form of popular protest where people hit a pot or pan with a spoon to call for attention, was born in the kitchen (Felipe Cuartas, Die Tupfe, video, 2019). However, in popular imagery the kitchen is often the background for the meetings of all kinds of conspirators, who are almost always exclusively male.

  In the recent lockdown, the kitchen stopped being a private space. Publicized, shown, and illuminated, it has become the setting for various vlogs – often quite creative and experimental. Yet for most of us, the kitchen has become a symbol of isolation during lockdown and in our exhibition we approach it not only from a feminist point of view, but also from a universal perspective, as a setting for a global health disaster. The works we show at the exhibition seem to emphasize the aesthetic function of the room but also that its sterile beauty carries with it memories of trauma. The sterile white kitchen by Weronika Gęsicka, with its scaled-up kitchen utensils, evokes a dissecting room. The merciless video by Kielesińska shows Jerry the mouse constantly knocking out Tom the cat, while the eponymous protagonist of the video of Ryan Trecartin is going crazy again and again.

  It is not an accident that the title of our exhibition mirrors the name of the famous New York non-profit institution, presenting avant-garde and experimental art since 1971. It took its name from the kitchen at the Mercer Arts Center, where video pioneers could show their works.

  
  
  

• 22. Propaganda

  Everybody is outside of their insides
  Sharon Balaban | Ryszard Grzyb
  Curator: Jacek Sosnowski
  1–31.10.2020
  Open: Mon–Sat 12–6 p.m.
  Address: Foksal 11/1

  Map →
  www.prpgnd.net

  

  Ryszard Grzyb
  Aerial Phrases (Some things can happen in their own time, no earlier, no later), 2004, aluminium, 29x39 cm

  During this year’s edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend we would like to focus on the public space.

  The title of the exhibition – Everybody is outside of their insides – comes from the cycle Aerial Phrases by Polish painter and poet Ryszard Grzyb. By using abstract slogans printed on metal plates or billboards, the artist changes the character of urban landscape.

  A similar effect is achieved by Israeli video artist Sharon Balaban, an avid observer of everyday life, whose poetic films are displayed on LED billboards located in the busiest parts of New York and Tel Aviv. The presentation of these subtle interventions created by both artists will be a radical gesture of opening the gallery for the city’s aesthetic and rhythm.

  Sharon Balaban was born in 1971 in Jerusalem, Israel. Over the period 1995-1999 she studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and in 2003 she graduated from Master of Fine Arts at The City University of New York. Balaban is the head of The Video Unit at the Screen Based Arts Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Sharon Balaban makes short video arts using the simplest ways of expression and the natural lighting. She changes the original meaning of objects: water running from the tap resembles a feminine nude, a banana peel becomes a dead bird fluttering with its wings. Her works were exhibited, among others, during Mediations Biennale in Poznań, Poland. Sharon Balaban currently lives and works in Jerusalem.

  Ryszard Grzyb was born in 1956 in Sosnowiec. In 1979, he graduated from the State College of Arts in Wroclaw in the studio of prof. Zbigniew Karpiński and later on, between 1970 and 1981, he studied at the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He graduated from the studio of Prof. Rajmund Ziemski. From 1981 to 1983 he worked as an assistant at the Studio of Painting and Drawing at the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Warsaw Academy of Art. In 1982 1992, Grzyb was a member of the Gruppa and a co-founder and editor of the Gruppa’s newsletter “Oj dobrze już”. Ryszard Grzyb is also a poet and has made his poetic debut during his studies in Wrocław.

  
  
  

• 23. Raster

  Room Tour
  Karolina Jabłońska, Sophie Thun
  1.10–7.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Sat 12–6 p.m.
  Address: Wspólna 63

  Map →
  www.rastergallery.com

  

  Sophie Thun
  Altstadt, 11.03.2019, ST, 2019, photogram on baryta paper, in artist frame, 30×40 cm, courtesy of the artist and Sophie Tappeiner, photo: Kunst-Dokumentation.com

  The heroine of the works of Karolina Jabłońska (born 1991) and Sophie Thun (born 1985) is a young woman, an artist seeking personal liberation and empowerment in art. Room Tour is an exhibitionist inspection of the space in which she creates. A room of one’s own, once a symbol of creative emancipation, now becomes a space of loneliness and melancholy in the time of the pandemic and the social isolation it has imposed. In the painterly and photographic images of Jabłońska and Thun, autoerotic and vanitas motifs intertwine with reflection on the medium as an instrument for representation, and assertiveness also understood as a right to be unproductive. These images include allusions to classical iconography and contemporary media reality. Jabłońska’s painting is characterized by an individual, expressive style, whose hallmarks are a tendency to rescaling and deformation, and a multihued light stressing the plasticity of the bodies. In turn, Thun’s unique photographs have a post-media character, combining classical photographic technique with performative elements. In the photograms, the artist’s body is present simultaneously as a photographic image and as an illuminated trace, a kind of physical reflection. The motif of the self-portrait recurs many times in Room Tour as an ambivalent figure of creative autonomy and isolation, strength and exhaustion.

  
  
  

• 24. Rodriguez

  Persistence
  Marlon de Azambuja, Gonzalo Elvira, Dalila Gonçalves, Agnieszka Grodzińska, Jimena Kato, Michał Martychowiec, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Michał Smandek, María Tinaut, Keke Vilabelda
  1–4.10.2020
  Open: Fri–Sun 12–7 p.m.
  Address: Litewska 11/13

  Map →
  www.rodriguezgallery.com

  

  Sreshta Rit Premnath
  Eclipse, 2019, Sumi ink on paper (triptych) 56x76 cm each, courtesy of the artist and Rodriguez Gallery

  The exhibition revolves, as the title indicates, around the term ‘Persistence’, which have a special significance in our times and will probably have as well in the nearest future. A selection of artists collaborating with Rodríguez Gallery confronts this term in its broad meaning, presenting their own reading and understanding from their experience and artistic practice. The resulting group of works applies to different contexts (i.e. social, artistic, political), which leads us not only to analyse each individual approach to the subject, but also to raise questions about how art engages with contemporaneity.

  Persistence could also relate to the gallery, who in October celebrates its 5th anniversary in Poznan.

  
  
  

• 25. Serce Człowieka

  We paint what ghosts and angels tell us to
  Zuzanna Bartoszek, Krzysztof Grzybacz

  Pandemic consequence: dreams
  Michalina Chłodzińska, Milena Soporowska, Martyna Bolanowska, Adam Kozicki, Kamil Pierwszy Iwo Panasiewicz, Katarzyna Olma, Paweł Olszewski, Aleksandra Liput, Jan Jurczak, Yui Akiyama Planeta, Jan Porczyński, Zuza Piekoszewska, Joanna Krajewska, Øleg&Kaśka,Oskar Pawełko, Jan Możdżyński, Weronika Wysocka, Kaja Rata, Agnieszka Antkowiak, Laura Ociepa, Zofia Pałucha, Marceli Adamczyk, Matejko Michał, Mateusz Wójcik, Jakub Gliński, TissueHunter, Katarzyna Balicka, Wojtek Skrzypczyński, Jan Eustachy Wolski, Paweł Żukowski, Magdalena Lazar, Wiktoria Walendzik, Marta Niedbał, Aleksandra Kompała, Joanna Woś, Antonina Widt, Agnieszka Mastalerz, Konrad Żukowski, Maciej Nowacki, Grzegorz Demczuk

  1–18.10.2020
  Open: Thu–Sat 1–8 p.m., Sun 2–7 p.m.
  Adress: Nowy Świat 63 (Nowy Świat Muzyki, 1st floor)

  Map →
  www.facebook.com/serceczlowieka/

  

  Zuzanna Bartoszek
  Dating a model, 2020, oil on linen, 120x100 cm

  We paint what ghosts and angels tell us to
  Zuzanna Bartoszek, Krzysztof Grzybacz

  ‘I went to the Warsaw Old Town. A man painted in silver, with a halo and wings, stands still on a silver platform. He pretends to be a sculpture of an angel, but from close-up he does not look like a sculpture, he looks like a motionless man painted in silver. Sometimes he blinks, his body muscles tremble. There are silver and gold coins in the hat under the platform. When the angel hears their buzzing, with a moderate grace, he slowly changes his body position. “I wonder if this clown earns more than I do.” – I’m getting over my head, but I’m gonna take it away. I’m standing in the distance. I’m afraid to approach and stand in front of him with the children. I know that he will look at me with his acting, confident eyes, and then I will blush and cry. For some reason, I think the angel hates me. I’m standing in a shady alley, it’s safe here. I put the earphones in my ears to stop the tourists from talking. And with the soundproofing, the whole world falls as if it’s melting, only me and the angel bathed in the orange light of the lighthouse in front of me. After a while, I disappear, I melt into a brick wall behind my back, deeper and deeper, until only a cold bas-relief remains of me.’ ~ Zuzanna

  ‘There are little souls in different places. As you wish, you can meet them at home or on a walk. They are a few hairs on white linen, which have formed the shape of a rose. With a silent voice coming out of your belly, you can cuddle up to. Or, sitting on the wall by the supermarket with a purchase confirmation holding a credit card receipt. No one will know when they’re gone. No one will know when they’re gone and blend in with the bedding, bellies and walls. They can have everything they want, combining images or sounds. I want to understand everything they say before they die, killed by other little souls.’ ~ Krzysztof

  ‘It’s over. Not even a season. Once again, no time to bring something to an end. Tonight the last night of my good old number. And it’s a full moon. And the trapeze artist comes tumbling down… Tais-toi. Be quiet. I never imagined it like that, the farewell to the circus. The last evening, no one shows up, you play like fools… and I fly around the ring like a poor chicken. And then I’m a waitress again. Merde. Moments like that, like right now… a beautiful memory in 10 years time. Time will heal everything, but what if time was the illness? As if sometimes one had to lean over to go on living. To live… A look is enough. The circus… I’ll miss it. It’s funny. It’s the end, and I don’t feel a thing. An angel passes by. I must stop having a bad conscience. (…) Who are you? I don’t know anymore. But I do know: I will no longer be a trapeze artist…’ ~ Marion / ‘Wings of Desire’, 1987 (Wim Wenders)

  Pandemic consequence: dreams
  Michalina Chłodzińska, Milena Soporowska, Martyna Bolanowska, Adam Kozicki, Kamil Pierwszy Iwo Panasiewicz, Katarzyna Olma, Paweł Olszewski, Aleksandra Liput, Jan Jurczak, Yui Akiyama Planeta, Jan Porczyński, Zuza Piekoszewska, Joanna Krajewska, Øleg&Kaśka,Oskar Pawełko, Jan Możdżyński, Weronika Wysocka, Kaja Rata, Agnieszka Antkowiak, Laura Ociepa, Zofia Pałucha, Marceli Adamczyk, Matejko Michał, Mateusz Wójcik, Jakub Gliński, TissueHunter, Katarzyna Balicka, Wojtek Skrzypczyński, Jan Eustachy Wolski, Paweł Żukowski, Magdalena Lazar, Wiktoria Walendzik, Marta Niedbał, Aleksandra Kompała, Joanna Woś, Antonina Widt, Agnieszka Mastalerz, Konrad Żukowski, Maciej Nowacki, Grzegorz Demczuk

  The coming change caused by the pandemic first manifested itself in dreams. At the beginnings of psychology, Freud assumed that one must turn to dreams – to bring them out of the unconscious sphere in order to expose one’s desires, cravings, fears. Today, many psychologists claim that such an attitude is wrong, and that what is instinctive allows us to live smoothly. Our mind is a cosmos in which too much concentration, too much exposure of certain components, manipulation of the unconscious makes us lose ourselves. Capitalism has always used human problems as a tool to exploit social groups. It has pointed them out, conceptualized or created new ones. Through overinterpretation he appropriated the unconscious zone for these purposes. As a result, our subconscious ceased to be pure, free. The pandemic as a time when many everyday phenomena forced by work were changed or pushed aside, revealed this state through dreams. For art, the pure unconsciousness is a natural matter of action that the “Pandemic Consequence: Dreams” exhibition wishes to selflessly reveal.

  
  
  

• 26. Stereo

  Cezary Poniatowski
  1.10–7.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Sat 12–6 p.m.
  Address: Bracka 20b

  Map →
  www.galeriastereo.pl

  

  Cezary Poniatowski
  Hearth, 2020, solo exhibition view, Jan Kaps, Cologne

  Cezary Poniatowski (b 1987 in Olsztyn, Poland) lives and works in Warsaw. In 2012 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he received his MFA. His recent solo shows include: Hearth, Jan Kaps, Cologne (2020); Hereafter (with Sami Schlichting), Mélange, Cologne (2019); Sick-box, Stereo, Warsaw (2018); Guard, JIL, Warsaw (2018); The Whole Picture, BWA Zielona Góra, Zielona Góra (2018). His recent group shows include: The Spirit of Nature and Other Fairy Tales. 20 years of The ING Polish Art Foundation, Silesian Museum, Katowice (2019); Nosztrómo, Ashes/Ashes, New York (2019); Waiting for Another Coming, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2018); Doors of Paradise, Union Pacific, London (2018); Friend of a Friend in Berlin, ChertLüdde, Berlin (2018).

  
  
  

• 27. Szara

  No Regerts
  Szymon Szewczyk
  1–10.10.2020
  Open: Tue–Sat 2–6 p.m.
  Address: Biennale Warszawa, Marszałkowska 34/50

  Map →
  www.galeriaszara.pl

  

  Szymon Szewczyk
  citylight advert design 2, 2020, photocopy, 29.7×21 cm, courtesy of the artist and Szara Gallery

  Human environment is exposed to the impact of numerous forces – economic, social, and physical. The recurring cycle of creation and destruction leaves behind traces of geometric structures and advertisement frames.

  The objects forming this installation represent change and uncertainty, they are monuments which resist the discipline of progress. They show the moment of transition, the state of limbo and temporariness, becoming discoveries of modern archaeology, whose meaning is lost in time, just like instructions found on an alien ship, covered with layers of dust gathered over the years. The remnants of shapes reveal outlines of letters and dynamic forms – former logotypes, sparkling with energy, movements, pleasure, and future.

  Szymon Szewczyk – audiovisual artist, stage designer, designer. Author of theatre music and experimental electronic project DMKHV. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice with a degree in painting. He creates paintings, objects, collages and installations. He is interested in the relations of humans with their material and cultural environment and the search for unobvious connections between seemingly distant phenomena, conspiracy theories, creative improvisation, temporariness, cheap materials, DIY, excess of information, suspicious scientific texts, stupid jokes, deadly seriousness, garbage, imitations, disturbances, errors, imaginary rituals, domesticated exoticism, doubt in an ordered knowledge of the world.

  
  
  

• 28. Szydłowski

  The Stories We Become
  Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
  Curator: Konstanty Szydłowski
  1.10–6.11.2020
  Open: Wed–Fri 2–6 p.m.
  Address: Wspólna 53

  Map →
  www.galeria-szydlowski.pl

  

  Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
  Romani Kali Daj, 2017, mixed media, 85x100 cm, courtesy of the artist

  Małgorzata Mirgi-Tas’ exhibition includes her latest works, collage paintings on canvas, objects inspired by the form of folk shrines, but also characteristic screens, which have become her trademark at international exhibitions in Berlin and Timisoara. Her commitment to Roma culture and against social exclusion is inseparable from her artistic work. Mirga-Tas’ works are characterized by combining painting with collages of found fabrics, often leaving two-dimensional canvases and becoming spatial objects like screens and shrines. Through her art, the artist tells about her experiences and the people close to her and present in her memory. Her sharpened sense of observation is combined with a subtle painting gesture, which is able to recreate a personal look at others, full of kindness, melancholy and fragility. Her works tell stories of bonds that connect people with different intensities and contribute to their lives.

  
  
  

• 29. Wizytująca

  Blue Sun
  Agata Kus
  1.10–28.11.2020
  Open: Wed–Fri 2–7 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.–2 p.m.
  Address: Grzybowska 88

  Map →
  www.tugaleria.pl

  

  Agata Kus
  Blue Sun, 2020, oil on canvas, 190x160 cm, courtesy of the artist and Wizytująca Gallery

  There is a kind of drifting reality the new pictures of Agata Kus refer to; they are filled with ubiquitous idleness and uncertainty.

  The author takes us into the world which is apparently familiar, yet not obvious, rather anxious, pitchy dark and deregulated. The viewer may feel incertitude whether the presented world really exists. The existing order is no more there and reality resembles something different than one might seemingly expect it to be, something beyond art. The new realism of the artist heads towards the oneiric world, therefore, it is not sure what kind of experience the viewer is going to have.

  Even though the pictures resemble reality, human figures look naturally and tomatoes are red, the viewer can spot an exotic serpent squirming in the box of pizza and the sun glows in blue…

  
  
  

• 30. Wschód

  HER DARK MATERIALS
  Maria Loboda
  1.10–7.11.2020
  Open: Tue–Sat 12–6 p.m.
  Address: Bracka 20

  Map →
  www.galeriawschod.com

  

  Maria Loboda
  To separate the sacred from the profane, 2016, Site-specific installation, dimensions variable, Installation view, CAC Vilnius

  Maria Loboda composes installations and sculptures to investigate cultural codes, represented by pictorial signs and the grammar of various materials and objects. Throughout her work, Loboda engages with the historical narratives attributed to certain objects and juxtaposes them with contemporary interpretations and modern references in order to address the transformation of meaning of objects and images, tracing their paths from conveyance to encounter. Her research stems from the fields of poetry and history and leads to a formal equation of language and materiality, whose interactions she examines and uses in order to question what they express beyond their common readings. Thus, through the deconstruction and reorganization of common forms and symbols, Loboda has become a unique voice in what is described as contemporary archaeology.

  Maria Loboda (1979) studied at Städelschule in Frankfurt a.M., where she was a student of Mark Leckey from 2003 to 2008. She preceded her training as an artist at the Steinhardt School of Culture, New York, from 2007 to 2008. From 2015 to 2016, she taught as a guest lecturer at Hochschule der Bildenden Künste, Zurich. In 2012, she received the Edward Steichen Award, comprised of a six-month residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City. In the same year she also participated in the International Residency at Les Recollets in Paris. She received a scholarship of the Hessian Cultural Foundation for London in 2009-2010 as well as a scholarship of the Cultural Foundation of Dresdner Bank in 2010. Loboda’s exhibition activities encompass the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Taipei Biennial (2014), and documenta 13 (2012). Important solo exhibitions include Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt a.M. (2018/19), Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2019), Kunsthalle Basel (2017), Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne (2017), The Power Plant, Toronto (2016), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012). Furthermore, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Contemporary Art Center, Singapore (2018), MADRE, Naples (2018), Modern Art Oxford (2016), Sprengel Museum Hannover (2015), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2015), Ludlow 38, New York (2012), MMK – Museum für Moderne Kunst (2010).

  
  
  

• 31. W Y

  Cream
  Gabriela Porada, Damian Ciszek, Izabela Magnuszewska, Kuba Stępień, Kolektyw YORBATKA, Marcin Kosakowski
  1-4.10.2020
  Thu–Sun 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
  Szkoła/Stowarzyszenie Pedagogów Teatru
  Emilii Plater 31

  Map →
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  Damian Ciszek
  Reinkarnacja, 2020, acrylic, screen printing on canvas, 50x60 cm

  The Cream exhibition is like a box of cream that you can open and look into nice, creamy and sour interior. Young artists talk about the reality that surrounds them, comment on their local microclimate, many times in an ironic way, presenting an anti-capitalist approach to life. They face the forthcoming huge steps of the future, what awaits them in their adult – post-academic – life, their next stage of maturity. The Cream has a multi-layered narrative. The perception of the exhibition can be destroyed from the very beginning, when you enter the space, you will come across the performance and object of the Yorbatka Collective. Two artists will talk about their memories that shape their understanding of the world, using ordinary objects and photos. Deconstructed, devastated. Other objects, paintings and videos will be impulses that accomplish the vision of Cream’s chaos. Damian Ciszek, a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, laureate of the Strzemiński – Fine Arts competition will present his video work and paintings, Gabriela Porada and Marcin Kosakowski will show video, Kuba Stępień will come with his audioinstallation and installations. The very important set of the Cream exhibition will be something like dumpster-altar, what means objects of Izabela Magnuszewska.