Galleries

• 1. Asymetria

  Jerzy Lewczyński, Zdzisław Beksiński, Bronisław Schlabs

  z udziałem Zbigniewa Libery

  Closed Show

  30.09–03.10.2021  

  Złota Milonga / entrance from Krasiński Garden ul. Długa 44/50

  Map →
  www.asymetria.eu

  

  Zbigniew Libera, Widok na ulicę Wolność, 2021

  20 czerwca 1959 w salce Gliwickiego Towarzystwa Fotograficznego, odbył się pokaz fotografii który przeszedł do historii jako „zamknięty”. Artyści biorący udział w wystawie; Jerzy Lewczyński, Zdzisław Beksiński i Bronisław Schlabs, skorzystali wówczas z możliwości pokazu kameralnego, bez oficjalnych plakatów i zaproszeń, by uniknąć cenzury, nie tyle politycznej co „socjalnej” i estetycznej, no i oczywiście historycznie, się jej nie wymknęli. 

  W swym ideowym zamierzeniu, wystawa miała być próbą przezwyciężenia kryzysu w fotografice tak jak to sformułował to już rok wcześniej w tytule swojego tekstu główny ideolog tej nieformalnej grupy Zdzisław Beksiński, który m.in. pisał „ Jeśli rzucimy okiem na rozwój historyczny fotografiki, przekonamy się, że mimo szumnych nazw poszczególnych kierunków, zmieniała się tylko i wyłącznie tematyka.” Co więc proponował Beksiński? 

  Między innymi sztukę montażu fotograficznego i w tym kierunku nastąpiło z jego strony i Lewczyńskiego główne uderzenie na tzw. reportaż artystyczno-fotograficzny. Schlabs pozostał wierny swej grafice ciemniowej. Oczywiście jest to skrócenie myślowe tego znakomitego i subtelnego pokazu. Niemniej w moim odczuciu okazał się paradoksalnie ostatnim aktem kryzysu o którym pisał Beksiński, nie żeby nie trwał on dalej w czasie,i owszem oglądamy go na własne oczy. Jednak „religijnie” był ostatnim dowodem na nie-istnienie fotografii jako sztuki, i wybił skutecznie nam to myślenie z głowy. Nie istnieje fotografia jako sztuka ale tylko sztuka jako fotografia. (Możemy kiedyś jeszcze do tego wrócić). 

   

  Asymetria w ramach Warsaw Gallery Weekend pokaże interpretację tego pokazu w kategoriach zaproponowanych powyżej. Zbigniew Libera, twórca par excellence (który nigdy nie ukończył Akademii) jest jednostką o niezwykłej odwadze gestu. I właśnie wyprodukował m.in.  trzy montaże aktualizując prace Beksińskiego. 

   

  Pokazowi który odbędzie się w przepięknym wnętrzu warszawskiego klubu tanga „Złota Milonga” będzie towarzyszył brulion „Asymetria Arch” w którym znajdziecie i teksty historyczne i najnowsze z montażami Zbigniewa Libery. M.in. przepisane słynne nagranie rozmowy psychiatrów i przyjaciół które odbyło się po Pokazie Zamkniętym a które przekazał mi na kasecie Jerzy Lewczyński. Będzie też tekst Zdzisława Beksińskiego , Potwory i Madonny który przepisałem z rękopisu. 

   

  Nie istnieje „rekonstrukcja”, niech żyje więc konstrukcja!

  
  
  

• 2. Biuro Wystaw

  Lia Dostileva, Andrii Dostilev, Krzysztof Gil, Zuzanna Hertzberg, Małgorzata
  Mirga-Tas, Natalia Romik,
  Ala Savashevich, Sergey Shabohin, Aleksander Sovtysik

  Inscriptions od Identity. Affinity, Difference, Gesture

  30.09–30.11.2021

  Krakowskie Przedmieście 16/18, apt. 4

  Map →
  www.biurowystaw.pl

  

  Zuzanna Hertzberg
  ש (Szin), 2021, acrylic, metal and enamel paints on canvas

  The exhibition presents the works of artists representing four domains of broadly understood identity (national, ethnic, cultural) – Belarusian, Romani, Jewish and Ukrainian. We understand it as a field of affiliation, stitched and limited by a personal creative gesture, individual and unique statement of one’s own experience, freedom, choice and strategy.
  Identity is a deposit and a commitment. It is not an article of the contract concluded by the artist with the heritage of their ancestors, but its clause. Our cognitive and emotional competence determines how much we are able to recognize this identity and sympathize with it without losing sight of its diversity and internal complications.

  
  
  

• 3. BWA Warszawa

  Jadwiga Sawicka

  ROYAL BODIES

  30.09–27.11.2021

  Marszałkowska 34/50/666

  Map →
  www.bwawarszawa.pl

  

  Jadwiga Sawicka
  Wojowniczka tradycji, 2021, oil, acrilic, colage, canvas, 50x60 cm

  Exposure to Jadwiga Sawicka’s art is likely to lead us astray. Unnoticeably, it disturbs our peace, undermines the pleasant feeling of being in the know and having steadfast opinions. In her new series of works the artist even closer examines collective desires to escape self-discovery and freedom in favour of comfort and safety – “VISION OF ZERO ANXIETY”.

  The messages painted in black, typical of her art, come from the depths of media unconsciousness. Devoid of authorship and personal responsibility, mindlessly repeated slogans, refer to the feminine gender: to priestesses, female servants and bondswomen, women-warriors, sisters. Sawicka sets her texts on pastel, flesh-coloured backgrounds with thick textures. On the strength of some invisible authority, “GOD’S EYE, GOD’S FINGER”, a single, shapeless – when without a norm – “WOMAN’S BODY” becomes attributed to generic roles, which are alien to it. It needs to identify with them well enough to desire them, not to admit any otherness, and – should it emerge – nip it in the bud. That is why – as the messages suggest – female lovers are in love with the system, women warriors fight to preserve tradition, female slaves succumb to the hold of comfort, and sisters come complete with an exclamation mark. Suppressing and denying other identities and emotions becomes a guarantee of both individual “COMFORT” and social order. For how long, though? The fleshy matter of the background seems to gently vibrate and live despite the stigma of media providence.

  Equally impersonal and typological are her painted depictions of clothes: suits, trousers, a bra. The artist juxtaposes them on the flesh-coloured background with cuttings from fashion magazines and slogans referring to the desire of comfort and happiness. Again, it is not known who is sending these messages to whom. Yet, though the clothes are graceless and unfitted for individual needs, when promised “WARMTH AND GOODNESS”, they imperceptibly become second skin.

  Text by Joanna Sokołowska

  
  
  

• 4. Dawid Radziszewski

  Yu Nishimura

  Ebb Tide


  30.09–20.11.2021

  Kolejowa 47a/U5

  Map →
  www.dawidradziszewski.com

  

  YU NISHIMURA
  night club
, 2021, 
oil on canvas, 130.3×97 cm

  Yu Nishimura’s paintings are based on simple motifs. People and animals, portrayed from up close or in wistful poses. City scenery mixed with nature: cars rushing off-road, lonely figures stray in suburban landscapes.

  For his first exhibition in this part of Europe Nishimura has prepared a new series of works. It was inspired by the notion of transition. The artist believes that perception is in a constant state of flux. To translate that impression into his canvases he operates with slightly blurred, misaligned edges, and layers of colors – soft, pale, translucent even.

  “My working process, I feel, can be somewhat associated and coincide with the shapes left behind after the waves have receded on the beach, or the seawater seeping into the sand”, says Nishimura.

  The imagery is a continuation of the familiar narrative. Lonesome protagonists captured in a tight frame (Chill Man), musing under a starry sky (Outfield) or marching through forests (Seasons); sudden but unhurried animal encounters (Cat Hill, School of Fish). Each and every painting is overlapping different times and perspectives into one.

  Yu Nishimura – born in 1982 in Kanagawa, Japan; studied painting at Tama Art University, Tokyo. He works with KAYOKOYUKI gallery in Tokyo.Yu Nishimura’s paintings are based on simple motifs. People and animals, portrayed from up close or in wistful poses. City scenery mixed with nature: cars rushing off-road, lonely figures stray in suburban landscapes.

  For his first exhibition in this part of Europe Nishimura has prepared a new series of works. It was inspired by the notion of transition. The artist believes that perception is in a constant state of flux. To translate that impression into his canvases he operates with slightly blurred, misaligned edges, and layers of colors – soft, pale, translucent even.

  “My working process, I feel, can be somewhat associated and coincide with the shapes left behind after the waves have receded on the beach, or the seawater seeping into the sand”, says Nishimura.

  The imagery is a continuation of the familiar narrative. Lonesome protagonists captured in a tight frame (Chill Man), musing under a starry sky (Outfield) or marching through forests (Seasons); sudden but unhurried animal encounters (Cat Hill, School of Fish). Each and every painting is overlapping different times and perspectives into one.

  Yu Nishimura – born in 1982 in Kanagawa, Japan; studied painting at Tama Art University, Tokyo. He works with KAYOKOYUKI gallery in Tokyo.

  
  
  

• 5. ESTA

  Andrzej Paruzel
  WARSAW, PARIS, ŁÓDŹ, KOLUSZKI, BERLIN and other passageways

  30.09–03.10.2021

  Aleje Jerozolimskie 51

  Map →
  www.galeria-esta.pl

  

  Andrzej Paruzel
  Soup and carrots with peas, 2016, lightbox, 95x130x10 cm, courtesy of artist

  The experience of Andrzej Paruzel’s work allows one to appreciate the relentless openness of the artist and his readiness to embrace new artistic and life strategies. In his travels down the streets of large cities and provincial settlements alike, mingling with artistic elites as well as homeless tramps, he enriches the spaces with new, resonant, often radically critical, poetic “points of reference” whose fiction and truth is anything but aporia.

  The exhibition features works spanning nearly half a century of Andrzej Paruzel’s artistic endeavours. Photographs from 1974/1975, i.e. dating back to even before his studies at the Łódź Film School, have once been described by Stanisław Ruksza as “lyrical conceptualism”; the somewhat later ones, from the period of 1976/1978, show evident influences of the Film Form Workshop. Most of the presented cycles illustrate journeys down the streets of major cities, such as Paris or Łódź, during which the author “interacted” with the architecture and various means of mechanical record – clocks or early automated photobooths. Andrzej Paruzel registers his presence – here and now.

  The early works provide the first glimpse into the Master of Earth Sciences’ future complete devotion to urban hikes practiced during his years with the Art and Culture Guides’ Office between 1988 and 2004. The daily tasks of the Office included marking various sites with the Office’s Art Object plaques.

  In the 1980s, the author also more frequently travelled the routes of art history. Be it modern, together with his friend Raymong Hains, a representative of New Realism with whom Paruzel collaborated for 25 years, or historically more distant, like the works of Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro or the female students of the School in Koluszki.

  The exhibition also features works documenting the author’s activity in Berlin, a monumental dry ice installation that in a way predicted the 1985 fall of the Berlin Wall. Also featured are pieces related to the urban activity of the Lookingglass travel Agency as well as his most recent works, such as “Kurzy Biura” [Office Dust].

   

  
  
  

• 6. Foksal Gallery Foundation

  Monika Sosnowska

  CONCRETE

  
  Piotr Janas

  Brazen-faced

  30.09–10.11.2021

  Map →
  www.fgf.com.pl

  

  Monika Sosnowska
  installation of the work, Glasgow 2008, artist’s archive

   

  Monika Sosnowska

  Concrete

  sculpture

  Concrete – a material obtained by mixing aggregate, the so-called filler, with a binder, which as a result of physical and chemical reactions forms a monolithic solid. The filler and binder may be a variety of organic (resins, bitumen) and inorganic materials (lime, cement). Typically, in ordinary concrete, the filler is gravel, and the binder is cement mixed with water, the so-called grout.

  Piotr Janas

  Brazen-faced

  painting

  Brazen-faced – ‘to be devoid of ambition, shame, honor, personal dignity, to be insolent, cynical, devoid of moral principles’, ‘shameless and impudent’ (Collins Dictionary). ‘Because I knew that you are stubborn, and your neck is a rod of iron and your forehead is copper, therefore I foretold you ahead, I announced the future to you before it came’ (Is 48: 4-5).

  
  
  

• 7. Profile Foundation

  Natalia Brandt, Tomasz Ciecierski,

  Andrzej Dłużniewski, Jarosław Kozłowski,

  Natalia LL,Paulina Ołowska,

  Ewa Partum, Teresa Tyszkiewicz,

  Ryszard Waśko

   

  Alphabet

  30.09–04.12.2021

  Franciszkańska 6

  Map →
  www.fundacjaprofile.pl

  

  Jarosław Kozłowski
  from the Unfinished Alphabet x 99 series, 1978, crayon on paper, 100x70 cm

  The Alphabet exhibition presents artistic activities featuring writing, visual text, and letters that become images. The idea of the exhibition is to show the intermingling in contemporary art of methods of communication inherent in the reading of text and visual perception. 

  The exhibition features works by artists from different generations, referencing diverse traditions and representing different artistic convictions. The common denominator is the use of the written word, writing with drawing, painting, photography, collage, and the body, combining the visuality of art with its textuality. The practices of the artists presented show the ambiguity of the phenomena in which writing and letters are the result of visualisation of experiences: writing as drawing, picturing using writing, constructing the alphabet using body language or the dynamics of gestures, processual writings and recording everyday emotions using writing devoid of semantics.

  The exhibition includes different versions of “alphabets” – works in which the artists chose the basic writing system as their starting point, filling it with new meaning and references. They transformed letters into a much more meaningful message than writing symbols. An alphabet shaped by the dynamics of gesture in processual notations, an alphabet as notation of artistic ideas, an imaginary alphabet transformed into abstract writing, an alphabet built using body language, and alphabet of feminist contestation written with a rebellious body, an alphabet game as a way of referring to past utopias.

  Writing takes very different forms, from recording subjective experiences to manifestations carrying themes critical of the observed reality. The presented works also recall various traditions, from conceptual and post-conceptual practices to feminist critique, from confessional stylistics to radical polemics with the pressures of cultural ideologies.

  
  
  

• 8. Gunia Nowik Gallery

  Jakub Gliński  

  YOU ARE TOO CLOSE  

  30.09–20.11.2021  

  Bracka 18/62

  Map →
  www.gunianowikgallery.com

  

  Jakub Gliński working on a mural for Jasna 1 club, May 2021, photo: Katarzyna Legendź.
  Courtesy of the Gunia Nowik Gallery

  As part of this year’s edition of WGW, the Gunia Nowik Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Jakub Gliński – painter, performer, audiovisual artist, a total and extreme creator. The inspiration and domain of Gliński’s work is destruction, decay, and civilisational waste, while his radical performative actions often leave the audience in a state of profound shock. He usually creates paintings and installations intuitively, using the gesture-rich aesthetics of Trash and Error. The blue-grey palette using an airbrush, intermingling patches of colour that resemble scratched walls (white, yellow, pink), visual quotations from murals, pop culture, tattoos or children’s drawings, have already become the artist’s clearly recognisable style. His actions in many fields are often a quick, subconscious reaction to the signals he receives from his surroundings. The starting point for the exhibition YOU ARE TOO CLOSE is a keen insight into emotions and the invisible border of safety people create around themselves. The exhibition was created in collaboration with Natalia Grabowska, a curator at the Serpentine Galleries in London.

  
  
  

• 9. HOS Gallery

  Konrad Żukowski

  I keep smoking and waiting for everything to burn down

  30.09–13.11.2021

  Dzielna 5 / 5B

  Map →
  www.hosgallery.pl

  

  Konrad Żukowski
  Horse Scared of the Wind, 2021, oil on canvas, 180x230 cm, courtesy of the artist

  Partly out of boredom. For pleasure. Against easy ignorance. For money and prestige. To escape from banality. To kill time. Not to get out of practice. By the unattractiveness of the alternatives. A little for fun and to lift the spirits. To unwind. Out of need. For lack of other choices. Because it came up somehow. Through the jumble of thoughts and ideas. By chasing dreams. Affected by the charm of art. Contrary to the artistic circles. In a natural impulse. Out of sensitivity. To break the routine. As part of continuous self-improvement. Because he likes it. 

  Żukowski doesn’t smoke any more. He paints. 

  The artist’s works reiterate the themes from the repertoire of medieval painting, surreal visions, feverish dreams or nightmares. Not intentionally. “Out of his head”, as he would say.

  In the darkness of Żukowski’s canvases, as if in the depths stretching under the closed eyelids, we can see skeletons dance. From the infernal flames human bodies appear – grotesque, mauled, and deformed. Creatures from fantastic bestiaries play. Dreams are also impregnated with scraps of everyday life, resemblances of the immediate environment. Skeletons and herds of horses, sexual fantasies, cheetahs and unicorns constitute a form of dreaming, and paradoxically also of vigilant insomnia that makes it easier to endure sometimes unbearable reality. 

  The exhibition will present Żukowski’s latest paintings, in which he created new universes with impastos. He encapsulated some alternative realities in three-dimensional installations, cabinet-like altars erected for plastic deities. During the exhibition, the artist will again fill the walls of the gallery with a swarm of monsters and all living creatures, he will separate the brightness of the sheaves from the darkness of the paintings, and reality from sleep, leaving the viewer to indulge in the pleasures of dreaming.Partly out of boredom. For pleasure. Against easy ignorance. For money and prestige. To escape from banality. To kill time. Not to get out of practice. By the unattractiveness of the alternatives. A little for fun and to lift the spirits. To unwind. Out of need. For lack of other choices. Because it came up somehow. Through the jumble of thoughts and ideas. By chasing dreams. Affected by the charm of art. Contrary to the artistic circles. In a natural impulse. Out of sensitivity. To break the routine. As part of continuous self-improvement. Because he likes it. 

  Żukowski doesn’t smoke any more. He paints. 

  The artist’s works reiterate the themes from the repertoire of medieval painting, surreal visions, feverish dreams or nightmares. Not intentionally. “Out of his head”, as he would say.

  In the darkness of Żukowski’s canvases, as if in the depths stretching under the closed eyelids, we can see skeletons dance. From the infernal flames human bodies appear – grotesque, mauled, and deformed. Creatures from fantastic bestiaries play. Dreams are also impregnated with scraps of everyday life, resemblances of the immediate environment. Skeletons and herds of horses, sexual fantasies, cheetahs and unicorns constitute a form of dreaming, and paradoxically also of vigilant insomnia that makes it easier to endure sometimes unbearable reality. 

  The exhibition will present Żukowski’s latest paintings, in which he created new universes with impastos. He encapsulated some alternative realities in three-dimensional installations, cabinet-like altars erected for plastic deities. During the exhibition, the artist will again fill the walls of the gallery with a swarm of monsters and all living creatures, he will separate the brightness of the sheaves from the darkness of the paintings, and reality from sleep, leaving the viewer to indulge in the pleasures of dreaming.

  
  
  

• 10. Fort Institute of Photography

  Marcel Bascoulard, Casa Susanna, Bella Ćwir, Marian Henel, Michel Journiac, Zbigniew Libera, Tomasz Machciński, Pierre Molinier, Fetishist, Filipka Rutkowska, Tomek Trzeciak and others

  You’ve Gone Incognito. Cross-Dressing and Home Photoshoots    

  30.09–31.10.2021  

  Racławicka 99 (Fort Mokotów, building 01, 1st floor)

  Map →
  www.instytutfotografiifort.org.pl

  

  Marcel Bascoulard
  Pose 5, 19.07.1971, photography, 12.9x8.8 cm, courtesy of GALERIE CHRISTOPHE GAILLARD
  

  Garbo ‘got in drag’ whenever she took some heavy glamour part, whenever she melted in or out of a man’s arms, whenever she simply let that heavenly-flexed neck […] bear the weight of her thrown-back head. […] How resplendent seems the art of acting! It is all impersonation, whether the sex underneath is true or not.1

  Cross-dressing is a phenomenon that has been entwined with the photographic medium since the beginning. Today, the most vibrant platform for its embodiment is Instagram. The exhibition You’ve Gone Incognito presents photographs and short film pieces in which artists and their models enact female roles—from housewives to socialites, wealthy matrons to femme fatales. Roland Barthes stated that ‘the Photograph’s essence is to ratify what it represents,’2 and here we have what cross-dressers seek. The medium of photography enables them to construct the ‘girl-within,’3 with the photos then serving as tangible evidence of the manifestation of their female identity. The photo and video sessions presented in the exhibition unfold in the artists’ private quarters, often in intimate situations. They are staged with amateur means (in line with DIY principles), which additionally enhances the authenticity, lack of embarrassment, courage, and humour emanating from documentation of these activities.

  Artists, as anonymous creators posing in private interiors before their own lenses—just themselves and the camera, perhaps with a witness or two—can feel safe. They can experiment, be provocative, transgress norms, fulfil fantasies, play house; become a movie star, a model, a singer, a hairdresser, a slut and a saint. In general, they can be whoever they want—and not be themselves when they don’t feel like it. They enter their very own private mode, like a web user opening an ‘incognito’ window: ‘Now you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won’t see your activity. However, downloads and bookmarks will be saved.’

   

  1. Parker Tyler, ‘The Garbo Image,’ in The Films of Greta Garbo, eds. Michael Conway, Dion McGregor, and Mark Ricci (New York: Cadillac Publishing Co., 1963), 9–31.

  2.  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 85.

  3.  A phrase used by Tito Valenti, alias Susanna, in her ‘Susanna Says’ column for Transvestia magazine.

  
  
  

• 11. Jednostka

  Rafał Milach

  Strike

  30.09–16.10.2021

  Andersa 13

  Map →
  www.jednostka.com

  

  Rafał Milach
  from the ‘Strike’ series, 2020, photography, 63 x 50 cm, courtesy the artist and Jednostka Gallery

  “Gazes intersect. They are myriad and varied: from above, from the side, from behind, extended and persistent, fleeting, impassive, dictated by fear, duty, a sense of strength and curiosity. This range is a feature not only of the sociopolitical spectacle unfolding on city streets but is inherent to photography itself. Photography as an interpenetration of gazes.” So writes Karolina Gembara, one of three authors of texts for Rafał Milach’s book and exhibition Strike (Strajk), which is set to premiere during Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2021 at JEDNOSTKA Gallery.

  Strike is a visual record of the protests that began across Poland on October 22, 2020, and which persisted in various forms over the ensuing months. In a second text, Aleksandra Boćkowska chronicles the personal reflections of some of the participants of protests in Kartuzy, Lubaczów, Warsaw, and Kraków.

  Since 2019, Milach, together with sixteen fellow photographers, has been a co-creator of the Archive of Public Protests (APP), a platform for gathering documentation of social actions and grassroots initiatives that have opposed political decisions executed in violation of principles of democracy and human rights. Strike is a piece of this archive.

  The exhibition and book Strike examine one of the most significant formation processes contemporary Polish society has experienced. As Iwona Kurz writes in the project’s third text: “As a result of the strikes, the process of political self-organization continues, its outcome unknown. However, photographic documentation of the protests is a clarion call to all of our imaginations. Here I am referring to the thinking of Georges Didi-Huberman, who proposes that a photograph be treated not as a performance, but as an event the viewer must reconstruct. Image as ‘act,’ he writes, after Jean-Paul Sartre. The point here is to go one step further: less to reconstruct an event that transpired than to construct a reality designed within it. After all, the photographs ‘seem utterly real.’”

  The cover of the book was designed by Ola Jasionowska, the graphic designer behind the visual identification of the Women’s Strike (Strajk Kobiet) protest movement and its logo of a red lighting bolt. The exhibition and publication will channel the spirit of intervention, solidarity, and aid. Part of the proceeds from sales of the edition will be donated to organizations fighting for women’s rights.

  Rafał Milach (born 1978)

  Visual artist, photographer, author of photo books. Professor at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School in Katowice, Poland and the ITF Institute of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in Opava, Czech Republic. His award-winning photo books include The Winners, 7 Rooms, and The First March of Gentlemen. Rafał Milach has received scholarships from the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Magnum Foundation, and European Cultural Foundation. Finalist of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2018 and winner of the World Press Photo competition. Member of Magnum Photos since 2018. His works have been widely exhibited in Poland and worldwide, and can be found in the collections of the MoMA Warsaw, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, the ING Polish Art Foundation, Kiyosato, the Museum of Photographic Arts (Japan), and Brandts in Odense (Denmark).

  1. Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 113.
  2.  Walter Lippmann, quoted in: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 22.

  
  
  

• 12. Le Guern

  Wojciech Gilewicz

  Paintings 2002–

  30.09–13.11.2021

  Katowicka 25/1

  Map →
  www.leguern.pl

  

  Wojciech Gilewicz
  Paintings 2002-, photo: Kinga Olesiejuk. Courtesy the artist and Le Guern Gallery

  Paintings 2002- is a painting project by Wojciech Gilewicz started by the artist twenty years ago and consisting currently of 155 paintings of various sizes. However, the artist does not execute it himself, but invites the audience and institutions, in which the works are exhibited, to co-create it.

  Art institutions and galleries have the opportunity to become part of the project on the basis of an agreement specifying the terms of its realisation. The exhibition will present, for the first time in one place, all the paintings of the cycle created so far, in an arrangement prepared to fit the character of the gallery interior. However, this does not mean a summary. The infinite duration of the project means that the paintings are constantly subject to change, being continuously repainted. According to the artist’s instructions, this takes place every six months. The framework of the project simplifies the creative process to three physical elements: surface (canvas), colour (paint) and movement (hand). At the invitation of the artist, the audience takes part in the process of creating the painting cycle. This radical approach to abstract painting is at the same time deconstructed by the element of chance, giving the participants of the project total freedom in the choice of colours.

  The exhibition will be accompanied by a video work. The artist touches upon the creative process, the accumulation of images, randomness, and change. Wojciech Gilewicz’s work operates in a variety of contexts, with an ever-present conviction that painting has the potential to keep up with and describe our times.

  
  
  

• 13. LETO

  Maurycy Gomulicki
  & Xawery Wolski

  Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne

  30.09–13.11.2021

  Dzielna 5

  Map →
  www.leto.pl

  

  Maurycy Gomulicki
  Callipyge, 2021, photography: lambda print, ø 100 cm, courtesy of the artist and LETO, Warsaw

  We met a good 20 years ago in Mexico City. Our biographies overlap at various

  points, including the time we each allowed ourselves to get seduced by the

  Mexican sunshine and spent nearly a quarter of a century at the foot of several

  volcanos. All that while, we couldn’t divorce ourselves from Poland. Rather, we

  would run off and come running back at various intervals, at least regularly enough

  so that none of us could ever be considered a true immigrant. In spite of the

  obvious differences – me tussling about in the most porcine way in the fluorescent

  swamp of pop culture, Xawery inhabiting a significantly more refined space, swept

  up in neutral tones of white and golden brown – we still find ourselves agreeing on

  a good deal of things. We’re both insanely extra, and yet we still remain faithful to

  the tenets of minimalism. Both of us strive to achieve a certain sublimation of

  beauty in our race to capture its form in a manner that is simple, but adequately

  expressive – treating art as an overwhelmingly sensual experience. (…)

  text: Maurycy Gomulicki

  
  
  

• 14. lokal_30

   

  Karolina Breguła

  Dust

  30.09–19.11.2021

  Wilcza 29A/12

  Map →
  www.lokal30.pl

  

  Karolina Breguła
  Dust, 2019, film still,
 courtesy of lokal_30 gallery and the artist

  The exhibition Dust revolves around the problem of losing one’s home. In her project, developed since 2018 in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China, Karolina Breguła addresses the topic of mass evictions and demolitions. She examines the mechanisms of gentrification and the tactics of resistance against them, the social processes that take place in the demolition areas, and the experience of individuals who have suffered the loss of home. The show comprises photographs, film installations, spectacle footage, objects, and a book written in collaboration with scholars and victims of evictions. The artist weaves a multi-layered tale through which she seeks to capture the life-changing moment as well as the resulting uncertainty and instability experienced by residents of areas that undergo a transformation. Breguła’s works depict urban planning processes and their imperfections, while also documenting resistance and hope, exhaustion and resignation, and something that one of the book’s protagonists calls exercises in losing control.

  The eponymous dust generated by demolitions moves fast. According to a report commissioned by Breguła, the dust from the demolished house of one of the book’s protagonists travelled the distance of more than one hundred kilometres to a secluded location far away from the city on a day with little wind. The remnants of houses, which had not been scattered by wind, were taken away on trucks. The places described by the artist experience irreversible changes, whose evidence quickly disappears from the field of vision. Dust aims to offer a chance to examine something that is usually missing from top-down modernisation processes: the individual experience of losing one’s home, sense of belonging and identity.

  
  
  

• 15. (Polski) lokal_30 w Clay. Warsaw

  Jan Możdżyński

  Idźmy więc, ty i ja,

  kiedy wieczór na niebie rozpostarty trwa

  / Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  30.09–03.10.2021

  Clay. Warsaw

  Burdzińskiego 5

  Map →
  www.lokal30.pl

  

  Jan Możdżyński
  Sulk, 2021, oil on canvas, 150x110 cm, courtesy of lokal_30 gallery and the artist

  The exhibition Dust revolves around the problem of losing one’s home. In her project, developed since 2018 in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China, Karolina Breguła addresses the topic of mass evictions and demolitions. She examines the mechanisms of gentrification and the tactics of resistance against them, the social processes that take place in the demolition areas, and the experience of individuals who have suffered the loss of home. The show comprises photographs, film installations, spectacle footage, objects, and a book written in collaboration with scholars and victims of evictions. The artist weaves a multi-layered tale through which she seeks to capture the life-changing moment as well as the resulting uncertainty and instability experienced by residents of areas that undergo a transformation. Breguła’s works depict urban planning processes and their imperfections, while also documenting resistance and hope, exhaustion and resignation, and something that one of the book’s protagonists calls exercises in losing control.

  The eponymous dust generated by demolitions moves fast. According to a report commissioned by Breguła, the dust from the demolished house of one of the book’s protagonists travelled the distance of more than one hundred kilometres to a secluded location far away from the city on a day with little wind. The remnants of houses, which had not been scattered by wind, were taken away on trucks. The places described by the artist experience irreversible changes, whose evidence quickly disappears from the field of vision. Dust aims to offer a chance to examine something that is usually missing from top-down modernisation processes: the individual experience of losing one’s home, sense of belonging and identity.

  
  
  

• 16. m²

  Małgorzata Pawlak

  & Mikołaj Kowalski

  Night Tele Visions

  30.09–20.11.2021

  Oleandrów 6

  Map →
  www.m2.art.pl

  

  Mikołaj Kowalski
  one, 2021, 60x39 cm, wood, oil

  Nocne tele wizje to niebezpośrednia, ukryta między źdźbłami trawy oraz pośród świerkowego igliwia, historia tego, jak dwoje ludzi, w czasie pandemii, wobec zakazu wychodzenia z domu, potajemnie przemierzało nocą ulice swojego miasta, rozmyślając o rozmaitych sprawach, badając wszystko, co żywe, lecz nieporuszające się na dwóch nogach. Miejska przyroda, dziwna, półnaturalna, naznaczona ręką człowieka, zwykle przystrzyżona i wyrównana należy do nielicznej grupy tych, którzy z obecnej sytuacji odnoszą wyłącznie korzyści. Wyzwala się, buntuje i odrasta w najlepsze, będąc jak zwykle niemym i zdecydowanie obojętnym świadkiem ludzkich problemów. Jej zaskakująca różnorodność, inspiruje i pociesza, tym zaś, którzy potrafią się jej przyglądać, dostarcza znacznie więcej wrażeń niż nużąca ludzka paplanina. Szczęśliwy ten, kogo cieszy towarzystwo mchu wyglądającego spośród chodnikowych płytek! Nie dozna nigdy nudy, a jego samotny spacer pustą miejską ulicą przerodzi się osobliwy, wewnętrzny sen o rzeczach niewiadomych.

  Małgorzata Pawlak

  
  
  

• 17. Monopol

  Gabriele Stötzer

  / I come from a country that
  no longer exists

  30.09–27.11.2021

  Marszałkowska 34/50

  Map →
  www.galeriamonopol.pl

  

  Gabriele Stötzer
  Untitled, 1984, black and white photography, courtesy of the artist and Galeria Monopol

  She created performance without knowing that word. She created feminist art without knowing what it was. She created works compared by art historians to the works of Ana Mendieta, Nancy Spero, Carolee Schneeman and VALIE EXPORT, but she had not heard of these artists yet. Galeria Monopol is hosting the first solo exhibition in Poland of German visual artist, writer, political, and social activist – Gabriele Stötzer.

  “I come from a country that no longer exists,” says often Gabriele Stötzer, an artist who, in the 1980s, belonged to the progressive underground scene of the former German Democratic Republic. She made friends with young punks, was a member of a squat scene, did photo sessions and performances, shot subversive experimental films, as well as worked with textiles, ceramics and in fashion design, established art groups, and ran an independent gallery. However, unlike in other Eastern Bloc countries, all those activities were illegal and carried the risk of imprisonment in the GDR. Stötzer, similarly to the entire artistic milieu in the GDR, was almost completely detached from the art of the rest of the world.

  The exhibition at Galeria Monopol focuses on those aspects of Stötzer’s works that, despite the lack of direct contact, are surprisingly close to works of many Polish avant-garde artists of the 1970s and 1980s. The struggle against the totalitarian regime along with the historical and social circumstances in which her works were created, explain why the Polish audience understands her work intuitively, without the need for detailed clarification. Moreover, it is not only the historical context, but also current social situation, such as LGBTQIAP+ community movement and women rights movement, that makes Gabriele Stötzer’s art applicable and fresh again. The exhibition displays photographs, performance documentation, video, and textiles.

  
  
  

• 18. Naga

  Kornelia Dzikowska, Jan Jurczak, Tomasz Kawecki, Planeta, Aleksandra Przybysz, Julia Woronowicz

  HOUSEWORK

  30.09–10.10.2021

  Pracownia Wschodnia

  Władysława Skoczylasa 8

  Map →
  www.instagram.com/galerianaga

  

  Rizdvo 6. Etno Erotic Mysteries / performans / Performers: Taras Gembik, Katarzyna Korytowska, Filip Kijowski, Ignacy Hryniewicz, Planeta; Costumes: Planet

  The exhibition title, Housework, subsuming such mundane activities as, e.g., cooking, washing or cleaning, refers here also to practices of a sub-magical character. In their use of everyday objects, the artists seek ways of making the domestic space familiar, grounding their origins, or finding a home for the homeless.

  A pandemic-induced isolation in our own homes and/or houses has reinforced the need of locating our roots, making sense of them and having a closer look at our immediate surroundings. The family nucleus, our residential space and things we surround ourselves with have become central. Long-gathered objects have had their meaning altered: a part suddenly grew in a powerful sentimental value, while others were discarded. A need for change arose, for an ordering of the personal micro-world enclosed by these four walls.

  Kornelia Dzikowska, not unlike Tomasz Kawecki, elevates the problem of hoarding to the position of a private sacred in their artistic practices. Jan Jurczak’s works are effects of activities with children and their caretakers conducted in an eastern Ukrainian conflict zone and in a Polish Centre for Foreigners. They deal with the question of home-lessness. Aleksandra Przybysz approaches the domestic as a total and cosmogonic space. For the artist, it is a vehicle of inherited memory. Planeta’s collaborative ritual performance with Katarzyna Korytowska will be an essence of spiritual experiences, drawing on the customs of historic Slavs and on shamanism. The artist intends to honour the soil and the planet on which we all were born. Julka Woronowicz replaces the image of the Mother of God with an object created collectively by persons of any sex, and reverses the pattern ordering women to perform household duties, including creating decorations.

  
  
  

• 19. Olszewski Gallery

  Włodzimierz Jan Zakrzewski

  What Did the Artist Say?

  30.09–27.10.2021

  Szpitalna 8A

  Map →
  www.olszewskigallery.com

  

  Włodzimierz Jan Zakrzewski
  Warwick, 1996, acrylic, oil, ink, and pencil on canvas, 137 × 137 cm, courtesy of Olszewski Gallery

  Włodzimierz Jan Zakrzewski is not an effusive artist; his works are emotionally reserved, they cover more than they show. Despite his huge body of work, his inclination to process the output data, to accumulate and force it into tight forms, seems increasingly characteristic; the more he has to say, the less he shows. He – the artist – has merely been trying to leave traces on his way to his own pictorial conclusions, initially grappling with classics, and then with reductivist Constructivism. True, his early paintings record the dilemmas that concerned him at the time: he was debating the possibilities of holding on to painting as a medium fatigued and worn by millennia of existence. And then he also grappled with the world and himself. Memory Gaps (1980-2020) is a monumental reinterpretation of his Polyptych (1980), whose two parts were offered by a Dutch auction house as two autonomous paintings. Four decades later, the artist has revisited the same elements, piling on consecutive narratives, enhanced by the variety afforded by a generation’s experience. He would often forgo the classical pictorial form and choose elaborate multimedia pieces instead, involving the use of light and sound. Subsequently, enriched by such experience, he would go back to classical art techniques, making paintings and drawings that “remembered them.” In the 1990s, the artist admitted landscape to his work. Previously absent, in Warwick (1996) this motif takes on the form of postcard-like reminiscences where memories of places are echoed in the outlines of buildings; it peeks through from under a feeling captured with an expressive gesture.

  In 2020, Zakrzewski celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation from Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, but then a pandemic is hardly a good time for profuse celebrations. Still, contrary to the harsh reality, the artist came up with the multicolored Warsaw Notes (2020/21), which he describes as a manifestation of freedom. This show is an attempt to disentangle at least a few major threads running through his work as a basis for a short exhibition-essay, a visual haiku that would give the viewer an insight into the essence of what the artist stands for.

  
  
  

• 20. Piktogram

  Daniela & Linda Dostálková

  Claws Not Made To Shake Hands With

  30.09–30.10.2021

  Kredytowa 9/1

  Map →
  www.piktogram.org

  

  Daniela & Linda Dostálková
  Claws Not Made to Shake Hands With, 2020, Pigment prints on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, 70x100 cm

  Species inequality, the undesirable “wildness of nature” and also the consequences of a romanticized dualism woman/nature in western culture is one of the issues Daniela & Linda Dostálková introduce at the eponymous solo exhibition at Piktogram titled Claws Not Made to Shake Hands With. The exhibition might also, from their point of view perform as an activist campaign.

  Artists examine the complex problems faced today by animal welfare activists, the strategies of persuasion of their campaigns, and the visual language they draw on. They investigate what role do charismatic and non-charismatic species and the desirable or undesirable “wildness of nature” play in those campaigns.

  In the exhibition, they attempt to provide the most open interpretation to the viewer, relate to forms of domination, or invesion, interest and care: reject the dualism of nature, and the culture of patriarchal thinking.

  Artists have been constantly addressing post-humanist issues related to the depiction and protection of animals. The theme has been approached several times in previous shows, such as Heroic vs. Holistic (2017), introduced in the form of an erotic eco-drama. The exhibition offered a post-romantic view on ecology from both ethical viewpoints. Video installation Acid Rain & The Labours of Hercules: Capture Slay Obtain Steel (2017), displayed professional emotional distress of eco-activists, termed “environmental grief”. In the video Invasive Species (2018), artists advocated the concept of universal consideration of non-human species. Uncharismatic species as monsters notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of the third term that problematizes the clash of extremes which appeared in exhibitions Campaign and old sinne / reneweth shame. Artists traced unstable positions of uncharismatic species and women in the society and so-called cute versus wild paradox illustrating the human experience of nature. In 2018 at InOtherWords they published Hysteric Glamour, a two-act eco-drama proposed a post-traumatic, authentic way of knowing and caring for nature that requires a radical reconstruction of our idea of love. 

  
  
  

• 21. Pola Magnetyczne

  Monika Misztal

  Cherry Bombs, Pig’s Baying

  30.09–06.11.2021

  Londyńska 13

  Map →
  www.polamagnetyczne.com

  

  Monika Misztal
  The Boy, 2021, gouache on canvas, 60 x 50 cm, courtesy of Pola Magnetyczne Gallery, photo:
  Bartosz Górka

  In the exhibition Cherry bombs, pig’s baying, painter Monika Misztal recalls the memories of her childhood spent in Stara Dębowa Wola. The image of a goblet filled with cherries, which constitutes the starting point for the introspection, attracts us with it intensively red bounty. Its description reminds us that the taste of cherries’ is not sweet, but tart. Nobody really knows their own childhood memories, especially those from the first years of one’s life. Are there any memories of which we can say they truly emerge from our childhood, or are there only memories which refer to our childhood, asked Freud in 1899. The Latin etymology of the word “child” prompts at the origin of this state of affairs: infans is the one who does not speak. How could we remember then, if we had no words to name the sequence of experience and impressions, which , being the paradox of memory, binds and determines each one of us until the end of life. The memories referring to childhood are the memories that were told to us by someone, and here is another paradox: which words was the event described with and do these words, heard in the past, reflect our current way of perceiving the world?

  The artist’s stylistics, based on expressive combination of colours, haptic treatment of paint through unfettered action painting, lures our senses with a game of associations. The themes present in Monika Misztal’s prior cycles, such as Repulsion, Hunger, or ecstasy from the cycle Her, have demonstrated her interest in the human body as the place of untamed forces, both creative and destructive.

  Here, again, despite contemporary world’s temptation to control human thoughts and behaviour, a human being is not one-dimensional, and its body is not that easily disciplined. What Misztal appears to suggest, is that, if not for conscious “oak will”, sooner or later something will rebel inside of it.

  The journey to the memories of the first land is not the return to paradise lost, but an opportunity to ask oneself the pressing questions which last year’s crisis brought to us. And it should not be forgotten that, despite not being visible, there is ever a pig’s baying echoing in the background.

  
  
  

• 22. Polana Institute

  Zuzanna Czebatul, Barbara Falender, Maïmouna Guerresi, Irena Kalicka, Irini Karayannopoulou, Magdalena Karpińska, Shana Moulton, Apolonia Sokół

  She – Classicità

  30.09–03.10.2021

  Tyszkiewich-Potocki Palace

  Krakowskie Przedmieście 32

  Map →
  polana.institute

  

  Irini Karayannopoulou
  Woman with statute #2, 2021, acrylic on print

  The theme of classicism in the 1920s and 1930s came to the curators’ attention primarily through two exhibitions: ‚Realismus: Zwischen Revolution und Reaktion’ from 1981 and ‘On Classic Ground. Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930’, from 1990. Elena Pontiggia, the curator of the Italian version of the pan-European “return to order”, has found the most apt name for this tendency: modern classicità. The temptation to search for harmony, classical ideas and Renaissance inspirations was not resisted by the likes of Picasso, Georges Braque, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico.

Although some artists in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially those from the Mediterranean basin, tried to use the motifs characteristic of antiquity and the Renaissance (Italian artists smuggled classical themes into pop-art and in the conceptual art and trans-avant-garde of the 1980s), these attempts have never matched the work of the painters of the so-called “return to order” of the 1920s and 1930s. 


  One hundred years later, contemporary female artists boldly formulate their own reception of antiquity – independent, and often in opposition to patriarchal visions. Their return to taking inspiration from antiquity and art history seems very mature, intelligently filtered through the problems of the present, and without the burden of having to worship the old masters. The contemporary classicità is a woman. The woman is not, as in the case of artists from the 1920s and 1930s, merely a pretext to paint a nude symbol, but as the subject, the main character. In this story, Ulysses is replaced by Penelope who returns to herself after a journey that is a metaphor of reaching maturity, wider perspective and self-awareness.

  The exhibition in collaboration with The Museum of the University of Warsaw

  
  
  

• 23. Propaganda

  Tomasz Kulka

  Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge

  30.09–03.10.2021

  Oddział Muzeum Warszawy

  Piwna 31/33

  Map →
  www.prpgnd.net

  

  Tomasz Kulka
  Homo Insectum (detal), 2021, courtesy of the artist

  The starting point for the exhibition Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge are plants gathered by the artist and combined into unreal forms of non-existing specimen. These compositions are the basis of a series of paintings made using traditional technique of egg tempera on gilded boards, as well as being themselves part of the exhibition, in form of spatial collages enclosed in painted glass frames.

  To produce the artworks, Tomasz Kulka used common, often unappreciated plants, in order to point out the richness of segetal flora and its vital role in our ecosystem: lowering air temperature, retaining moisture in the soil and preventing its erosion, shelter for numerous insect species. Together, the artworks presented at the exhibition create a new kind of alternative Polish herbarium, unconventionally treated as a work of art and displayed in the galery space.

  
  
  

• 24. Raster

  Marcin Maciejowski

  Polish Environs

  30.09–27.11.2021

  Wspólna 63

  Map →
  www.rastergallery.com

  

  Marcin Maciejowski
  Dama już Państwowa (draft), 2021; 180x140 cm

  Artworks—rare, valuable, and desired—often fall victim to theft, appropriation or wartime losses. But just as often artistic heritage is the subject of ideological and political appropriation. These appropriations interest Marcin Maciejowski, a distinguished painter who navigates through Polish environs with great intuition and passion. In his latest works the artist recovers Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, stolen by the Nazis, but he also polemicizes with the conservative, statist model of “national heritage and sport” which now forms part of Poland’s ministry of culture. For Maciejowski, the Old Masters are part of modernity, and he also interprets historical paintings or the Jagiellonian tapestries in this contemporary manner. He restores them to modern sensitivity and treats them as metaphors for current topics and political disputes.

  Maciejowski’s other great theme is the image of the modern woman. His gallery of bold, charismatic figures includes Eve plucking fruit from the apple tree in paradise, contemporary women curators, and also participants in the recent women’s strike fighting for their rights. Maciejowski’s painting is realistic in the deepest sense of the word, consisting of creating images that speak in our voices, take part in ongoing social changes, and convey their everyday atmosphere.

  
  
  

• 25. Rodriguez

  Keke Vilabelda
  & Max Radawski

  Common Ground

  30.09–03.10.2021

  Al. Jerozolimskie 51/2

  Map →
  www.rodriguezgallery.com

  

  Keke Vilabelda
  Common Ground (detal), 2020, acrylic and enamel on canvas , 250x180 cm

  The Common Ground exhibition is a meeting of two artists: Keke Vilabelda and Max Radawski, who have an interesting manner of granting material form to concepts imagined in relation to specific or remembered places.

  The point of departure consists in paintings by Keke Vilabelda (Spain, 1986), in which the artist explores feelings of remoteness and familiarity with the landscape. Vilabelda juxtaposes two places: Spain and Australia, mutually connected by the existence of pink lakes − peculiarities that can be encountered in both hemispheres. The artist’s works are created by mimicking natural processes, such as sedimentation and evaporation. Individual layers of lacquer, drying at time intervals, can crack or dissolve the pigments on the canvas. An important role is also played by gravity, navigating water streams flowing on the surface of the paintings. What − at first glance − seems to be an abstract image, can become a bird’s-eye view onto a mysterious landscape.

  Works by the young artist from Poznań, Max Radawski (1992), also take us to remote places, evoking the echoes of Oriental culture and philosophy. In his practice, Radawski refers to the Japanese art of stone appreciation (Suiseki) that consists in linking stones to larger senses and forms, like resembling a mighty mountain. His works remind us that relations between humans, objects and nature are woven from moments of common perception and appreciation of time and space. This immersion goes together with sensory explorations, with roaming around far corners of memory, with discovering the palimpsest layer by layer.

  Common Ground is a holistic experience allowing us to take a breath, which we need so much nowadays. The search for the common ground indicated in the title can soothe us, can provoke a moment of contemplation, but most of all, provide sensual pleasure.

  Julia Stachura 

  
  
  

• 26. Serce Człowieka

   

  Wiktoria Walendzik

  Zuza Piekoszewska

  Martyna Pinkowska

  Under My Ribs a Home Lives

  30.09–24.10.2021

  Nowy Świat 63

  Map →
  www.facebook.com/serceczlowieka/

  

  Martyna Pinkowska
  Trucizna wdzieczności, 2021, 140x170, oil

  The exhibition by Zuzy Piekoszewska, Wiktoria Walendzik and Martyna Pinkowska is a journey full of contrasts through warm, domestic nooks and crannies, at the same time revealing magical phenomena and wild temptations in interiors inhabited by human and non-human creatures. In their work, Zuzy Piekoszewska and Wiktoria Walendzik deal with the subject of adapting to the domestic space, although their interests are very different. Wiktoria in her sculptures, often referring to furniture, encloses personal stories, creates self-portraits full of visions of her own identity, realising her fantasies and dreams in her works. Zuza embodies the home – she enters deeply into the structures of the four walls, penetrates, peeps into the intimate playground of microorganisms and the building material itself. Martyna Pinkowska, on the other hand, shows in her works mental and psycho-physical states of a contemporary woman which are usually experienced in isolation such as own flat. The exhibition entitled “Under My Ribs a Home Lives” creates an opportunity for a playful and critical exchange of meanings with space, which is an inseparable part of our everyday life.

  
  
  

• 27. (Polski) Śmierć Człowieka

  Michał Matejko

  Objects in a mirror are closer then they appear

  30.09–24.10.2021

  Lelechowska 5

  Map →
  smierc.cz

  

  Michał Matejko,
  bez tytułu, 28x34cm, courtesy of the artist

  The axis of Michal Matejko’s practice is rooted in experimentation with physical phenomena. This exhibition constitutes the result of over two years of the artist’s ongoing process of observing illusory occurrences. One of them is when the perceived object is closer to the observer than it might appear. The illusion in this case becomes a kind of poetry of the moment. By splitting the light, the artist deforms the representation of objects. He strips them of their primordial, practical functions and subordinates them to the rules of composition. While rigorously keeping his works in a raw aesthetic, he puts utilitarian objects in an isolated gallery space and exploits them to construct his very own order. The light of a flash hits the mirror surface of a car headlight too fast for the human eye to register. If one could slow it down to a fraction of a second, one would see the light spill over the folds, grooves, and curves of the laminate. You could see dozens of images. Some of them could be captured on the camera’s sensor, fixed and enlarged. We encounter a stop in the loop of events: light – reflector – artist – matrix – matter – viewer. The creative process works here as a mirror in front of which there is yet another mirror. A safety warning on a vehicle’s side mirror reads: objects in a mirror are closer than they appear. This simple notice tells us something about the imperfection of the perception process. The implication of realizing there is an error is a fear and a desire to avoid it. To see more. To step back – step forward – step back again: the loop. Is there freedom in the loop? The light almost begs for our attention, creating forms that invite contemplation. The charm of the form is addictive. The artist transforms, reigns the untamed, registers, reorders. However, he is always torn between what he sees and what he would like to see.

  The gallery would like to thank Arx for their financial support in creating the works for the exhibition.

  
  
  

• 28. Stereo

  Zuzanna Bartoszek

  A Walk with a Knife

  30.09–30.10.2021

  Bracka 20b

  Map →
  www.galeriastereo.pl

  

  Zuzanna Bartoszek
  Diner, 2021, oil on canvas, 40x50 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Stereo

  When I was a few years old and I was returning home with my mother, we were passed by a long-bearded man whose gait was full of weakness, even for his age. In the 1990s, there were many drunks, homeless people and other derelicts in the district of Jeżyce, so the sight of him was not particularly unusual. However, when we arrived alongside the man, we noticed that a long knife was sticking out of his belly and the blood around the wound had already soaked through the layers of clothes. Mom immediately called an ambulance, but the old man was insisting strongly that we shouldn’t. Eventually, he was taken to hospital against his will. But he gave the impression that if he had been left on his own, he could have walked off with that knife in his belly for quite a long way – to his house, maybe even to take a nap, have a bite to eat and read the newspaper.

  “Walk with a Knife” is the title of an oil painting, one of many shown at the exhibition.

  When I was a few years old and I was returning home with my mother, we were passed by a long-bearded man whose gait was full of weakness, even for his age. In the 1990s, there were many drunks, homeless people and other derelicts in the district of Jeżyce, so the sight of him was not particularly unusual. However, when we arrived alongside the man, we noticed that a long knife was sticking out of his belly and the blood around the wound had already soaked through the layers of clothes. Mom immediately called an ambulance, but the old man was insisting strongly that we shouldn’t. Eventually, he was taken to hospital against his will. But he gave the impression that if he had been left on his own, he could have walked off with that knife in his belly for quite a long way – to his house, maybe even to take a nap, have a bite to eat and read the newspaper.

  “Walk with a Knife” is the title of an oil painting, one of many shown at the exhibition.

  
  
  

• 29. Szara

  Lena Achtelik, Monika Falkus

  I’ve been living in a fool’s paradise

  30.09–03.10.2021

  Galeria Prześwit

  Freta 39

  Map →
  www.galeriaszara.pl

  

  Monika Falkus
  I'd rather avert my eyes, 2021, oil on canvas, 82x60 cm

  We were awakened and the awakening was not pleasant. It was a bit like a thump at the door early in the morning instead of the expected warm brush of the lips on the ear and the whispered invitation to continue having fun beyond dreaming. Shaken out from the warmth of our hearth and home, startled from our daydreaming, we are looking around in panic, because nothing looks the way it used to just a while ago, and danger lurks around every corner. There is no coming back, but nobody can take our memories away, and the dreams of a happy life in a fool’s paradise are a gift we can give ourselves.

  Achtelik & Falkus’s exhibition is an invitation to the world of the awakened, who fearfully look around with their crusty, sleepy eyes, to find a way back to the lost land of dreams, to quickly run away from the new, disagreeable reality.

  Lena Achtelik (born 1989) – graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice and of history at the University of Silesia in Katowice. She lives and works in Katowice. Her work revolves around painting, book arts, and creating objects. The main focus of her activities is thanatology as well as the areas of cultural memory and history of symbols.

  Monika Falkus (born 1993) – graduate of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice and of art history at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Her work is focused on oil painting, creating installations, and video arts. She penetrates the subjects of love and women’s nature related to intimacy and sexuality. In her activities, she draws from tradition, fables, and her personal memories. She believes that moods have colours.

  
  
  

• 30. Szydłowski

  Wiktor Dyndo, Nina Haab

  Post-History

  30.09–19.11.2021

  Nowolipie 13/15

  Map →
  www.galeria-szydlowski.pl

  

  Wiktor Dyndo
  Breaking News (7), 2020, oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, photo Adam Gut, courtesy of the artist

  Revolving about the concept of wait and its role in public and private narratives, the two artists of the exhibition Post-History investigate dimensions of time and storytelling.

  Swiss artist Nina Haab explores the mechanisms of temporal suspension, the construction of memories and the act of remembering. The installation Peppy Wrecks (2021) celebrates embracing the unknown and the ability of existing in contradictions as acts of resilience while overcoming adversities. Two parts of one unique piece of furniture appear to us standing on sand, carrying on their surfaces mysterious drawings and the sentence: “You wouldn’t have guessed”. Along with Peppy Wrecks, Haab’s new series Locus Amoenus (2021) deals with the topos of an idyllic place capable to heal the body and the mind, while her drawings from Vue sur Jersey (2018-2020), remind us of the impossibility to have the totality of the picture where private and global narratives intertwine.

  Questions connected to notions of reality and their representations are also related to Wiktor Dyndo’s practice. The Warsaw-based painter works with a realist style to increase the un-easiness of a world that, through an overwhelming and ubiquitous media-apparatus, has become “too real, too frightening”: too close and too ungraspable. His series Breaking News (2019-2020) presents the homonymous’ caption superposed on still lives, sea shores, or baroque interiors. This heightens the effect of waiting for an event, for something to “happen”, to manifest, while using for these estheticized images the typical square format of the Instagram feed. Questioning the role of information and meaning in contemporary societies, Dyndo produces visual breaks that are both static and frantic, reflecting on notions of anxiety and wait.

  
  
  

• 31. Wizytująca

  Marek Sobczyk

  Το Σαββατοκύριακο

  30.09–10.11.2021

  Grzybowska 88

  Map →
  www.tugaleria.pl

  

  Marek Sobczyk
  Young Ladies of Avignon; With What? Father Piętka’s Left Hand, [Painted on the Orders of the Superior Beings], 2015, egg tempera on canvas, 230x180 , photo: Adam Gut

  The Gallery presents, it opens its windows towards the city, (from the perspective of Saturday) the stuff that is inside, the foregoing things, (from the perspective of Sunday) this what is external, this what is going to happen.

  On Saturday-Sunday: a gallery, a viewer/a vieweress/a viewpoint, the means of visual art,

  a painter/a paintress/painting, a piece of art – the remaining picture*. To some extend it resembles looking for, in one’s leisure time, the means of painting between the viewer, the painter and the very picture understood as a picture of the picture as well as a piece of art. Figuring out what these things have in common: what – who – what with – who with**: shown, watched, painted.

  *For some reason the language of visual art, the language of painting – becomes – the most conventional – artificial – yet – creating – some – real – space for watching. Since it creates the time of watching it: the language of painting can sometimes be explained by artificiality – reality, by flatness (two dimensions) – spaciousness (four dimensions), by immobility (picture/picture) – mobility (attracting – repelling: gravitational waves), by limits – infinity, by psychophysiology – influencing/resulting/shaping. The previous and next issues often deal with mediation of painting because it often explains and justifies other languages of visual art.

  ** The atmosphere of cooperation: jostling, multiplying but also reducing and limiting. For example “a picture of the picture” can be understood as: 1) recreating the picture of the perceived, in nature, under the eyelids, in combination of forms; 2) going further or above the painted picture; 3) a kind of open design of some structure built by adding consecutive layers of paint without covering the previous ones.

  Returning, in a way, to the language, in fact, a bit festive (sanctifying) language. The slow passage of the released means of visual art from the weekend towards festival.

  (ms)

  /translation by Hanna Korolczuk/

  
  
  

• 32. Wschód

  Jan Domicz

  Suite of rooms

  30.09–06.11.2021

  Bracka 20b

  Map →
  www.galeriawschod.com

  

  Jan Domicz
  Amfilada

  Jan Domicz (1990, Opole PL) is a creator of videos, objects and installations. In his works, he uses narrative potential of a space and its socio-political implications. He creates systems at the junction of private and common space. Instead of solving problems, these systems create them. Problems create a narrative. Narration gives meaning to a space. In addition to his artistic practice, he has been running the quasi-curatorial project „Office for Narrated Spaces” since 2017. He is a graduate of the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and the University of Arts in Poznań.

  The exhibition by Jan Domicz will be composed out of two consecutive chapters “Enfilade Enfilade” and “Rooms Rooms”