By Krzysztof Kosciuczuk
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Piotr Lakomy's 'Tomorrow Will Be Smaller' at the temporary space of Galeria Stereo, Warsaw
Over the last few years the Warsaw Gallery Weekend (WGW) has grown from a string of low-key, sequential openings into a – still fairly modest – well orchestrated event that attracts galleries and gallery-goers from Poland and beyond. With state institutions joining in to open exhibitions and host special events on the occasion, as well as panels with seasoned international collectors sharing insights on their practice, one can safely say that WGW is making its mark on the Polish (and hopefully international) art scene. Now that the dust has settled, I’ve assembled a few picks of shows in the fourth edition of WGW that are worth taking note of. (And, lest anyone wonder, they’re listed in alphabetical order).
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‘Imagorea’ at Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
‘Imagoria’ at Foksal Gallery Foundation
With their premises in the midst of a radical makeover, Foksal Gallery Foundation briefly moved in to a newfangled building built for the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts on the bank of the Vistula that was yet to be officially opened. In one corner of the buildings grey, concrete-walled lobby stood a wooden cage-like structure designed by architect Andreas Angelidakis; its interior housed a mesmerizing collage of several dozen paintings by Jakub Julian Ziolkowski. This was the second iteration of a massive survey, ‘Imagorea’, held earlier this year by the municipal gallery BWA in the city of Zielona Gora. Presenting works made by Ziolkowski since early 2013, the show offered a good chance for the Warsaw audience to become acquainted with the artist’s recent work. This was a mixture of abstract shapes, biological forms, portraits and landscapes that felt surprisingly coherent when presented en masse.
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Installation view at Monopol, Warsaw
‘Andrzej Partum / Zbigniew Warpechowski / Roman Dziadkiewicz’ at Monopol
If I had been really pressed for time (as many of my colleagues often are) Monopol may not have made this list, quite simply because one had little chance to see the show on the Gallery Weekend. Well past noon on Saturday the place was still shut, but displayed signs of a long and successful opening the day before. However, since (unlike some of my colleagues) I go past Monopol several times a week, I heroically tried to forget this (for the time being) – the WGW takes place once a year and if you go to the lengths of participating, make sure you are in the gallery when it happens, not elsewhere. But enough nagging. Launched early this year, Monopol is a new arrival on the Warsaw scene, but their scope of interest seems quite defined and ambitious, representing, in large part, artists born in the 1930s. This show sought to draw out the personal connection between Zbigniew Warpechowski (born in 1938) and Andrzej Partum (1938–2002). The former is a father figure of Polish performance and a student of the Krakow Technical University and Academy of Fine Arts; the latter was a maverick, self-taught artist, musician and poet born and raised in Warsaw. Seemingly poles apart, the artists established a close relationship, which was brought to the foreground here through archival materials with the help of a younger-generation Krakow artist, Roman Dziadkiewicz. A ‘gem in the process of polishing’ – the expression used to describe the exhibition by Marcin Krasny in the magazine Obieg– aptly sums it up.
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‘Zombie Formalism’ at Piktogram, Warsaw
‘Zombie Formalism’ at Piktogram
For the group show ‘Zombie Formalism’ at Piktogram/BLA (the latter stands for Bureau of Loose Associations), curator Michal Wolinski went out on a limb to combine works by four diverse artists: Szymon Malecki, Tomek Sacilowski, Jacek Sempolinski and Kajetan Sosnowski. Taking its cue from the eponymous text by Walter Robinson, the show could be read as taunting the idea of exhibitions based on far-fetched juxtapositions and formal affinities that, in the end, seem to ‘sit well together’. Except, in this case, the two younger artists (Malecki and Sacilowski) have received no formal training, and their works are displayed alongside those of two major historical figures of 20th-century Polish painting (Sempolinski and Sosnowski), concerned with issues of colour and abstraction. While questioning the nonchalance of superficial market practices aimed at bestowing unexpected formal genealogies upon new artists, and thus offering them a safe landing in the world of art, Wolinski drew viewers’ attention to artistic practice itself. It is the focus on the process, he seems to suggest – the treatment of the material, be it chemical, photosensitive, or physical – that is at the heart of the game.
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Antje Majewski at Pola Magnetyczne
Antje Majewski at Pola Magnetyczne
Pola Magnetyczne, or Magnetic Fields, a gallery on the northern fringes of the well-to-do villa neighbourhood of Saska Kepa, opened its doors in December 2012. Since then it has already earned a reputation as a site of singular presentations. With each visit, the space on the first floor of the house (home not only to the exhibition space but to the gallerists as well) seems utterly different. This time is no exception. Arriving to see the solo presentation by Antje Majewski, I was greeted and offered tea by the gallerists, after which we stepped into the exhibition space. ‘What is your first memory of a museum?’ asked Patrick Komorowski, as my eyes wandered across a low plinth topped with what seemed like fairly random findings from a Sunday stroll through a flea market and a forest. I gave him an honest answer: it was a small municipal museum in my hometown. It was only a few minutes into our conversation that I realized he had changed roles, making a perfect segue into a scripted narrative – a short story written by Sebastian Cichocki of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art. Taking me on the journey on which I had unwittingly embarked, Komorowski guided me through a fascinating tour of Majewski’s The Museum in the Garage– a medley of objects from the Museum of Prehistoric Thira in Santorini, the Ravensbrueck Memorial Site and the studio of Jeanne Mammen, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt as well as the artist’s own collection. None of them random, each and every one of them with a story waiting to be told.
Piotr Lakomy at Galeria Stereo
After their move from Poznan, Galeria Stereo hadn’t enjoyed their new Warsaw exhibition space in a modest, Modernist pavilion for long before they were forced to look for another venue. For WGW they came up with an unlikely site: what used to be the largest printing facility in the Polish People’s Republic. For his show ‘Tomorrow Will be Smaller’, Piotr Lakomy produced a group of minimal sculptures and installations involving light, colour and mass-produced building materials that blended seamlessly with the post-industrial nooks and crannies, inviting viewers to re-examine it time and again.
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Erwin Kneihsl, guest appearacne of SVIT (Prague)
Erwin Kneihsl at Svit
For the first time (and hopefully not the last) WGW witnessed a gallery from abroad parachuting into the event. Prague’s SVIT made an appearance with works by the Austrian photographer and filmmaker Erwin Kneihsl. Presented in an empty apartment in a tenement house overlooking the most salient of Warsaw’s monuments, the hulking Palace of Culture, this forgotten rocket left sitting on its massive landing pad made Kneihsl’s Universe look very much at home. Several dozen black-and-white works were hovering in mid-air on nylon thread. Clusters of aircraft, churches, suns or moons, and one intensely orange (if memory serves) gorilla appeared like offhand snapshots taken by an amateur. Much like the artists presented at Piktogram, Kneihsl is interested in the physical and chemical processes that lead to the emergence of an image.
Aneta Grzeszykowska at Raster
Aneta Grzeszykowska’s ‘Selfie’ was a powerful series of photographs that originated as sculptures. The artist used pig skin to painstakingly model fragments of her own body, most notably, her head. Shot against backgrounds of smooth, toned leather, the eyes, fingers, lips and chins form a fragmented self-portrait in which carnality and objecthood play the lead roles. The show marks another stage in the artist’s exploration of her own identity, which she began with the series ‘Album’ (2005), in which she erased her figure from over 200 family photos, and continuing in different forms and media, including video and hand-sewn sculptures. Here, the body is both fetishized (modelled, painted and photographed with obsessive attention to detail), as well as degraded (through the emphasis on using animal remains).
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Warpechowski at Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw
To be sure, there was plenty to be seen outside of this selection. The exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art – ‘Private Settings’ (a compelling show of post-internet art featuring stars of this trend, such as Ryan Trecartin), and Maria Bartusova’s ‘Provisional Forms’ – as well as the retrospective of Warpechowski in Zacheta, are worth noting. This year’s edition of the Warsaw Gallery Weekend is meaningful for a number of reasons, one of them being the decision to formalize the collaboration between the growing number of spaces participating, which resulted in the establishment of an association of art galleries (SGS), whose role is to coordinate the event as a common effort. Apparently, the organizers take their job seriously, and so, I hope will the gallerists. I’ll be there to see the next move, and I hope many others will be, too.
Krzysztof Kosciuczuk is a writer based in Warsaw, Poland.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.