By Krzysztof Kosciuczuk
Clik here to view.
Work by Emil Cieslar at Pola Magnetyczne gallery, Warsaw
The 2015 edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend (WGW), which took place the final weekend in September, was a mixed bag of treats, offering audiences the opportunity to explore the output of long-unseen artists as well as recent works by well known names. Some spaces have changed their addresses, moving out of the Praga district to nestle in venues in the city centre.
Foksal Gallery Foundation re-opened early this year, after a complete makeover by Roger Diener that left all but the original stairwell intact. Those who expect Piotr Uklánski’s solo show in the new space to feature sprawling installations of imposing proportions might feel disappointed. But while ‘Today We Can Give You Nothing But Memory’ is modest in scale, it is truly ambitious and dense in subject. Fifteen photographic prints, varying in size and technique, focus on a number sites and sights of the artist’s native country. Among them are monuments commemorating the war casualties of Warsaw, the children who perished at the hands of the Nazis and the victims of the Second World War, as well as historical landmarks like the cathedral on Krakow’s Wawel Hill, or a 1950s worker in bas-relief decorating Warsaw’s socialist realist residential district. These are interspersed with less distinct images: a dark silhouette of a tree set against a cold bluish sky, or a nocturnal cityscape with warm blurred lights looming in the distance.
Clik here to view.
Piotr Uklanski at Foksal Gallery Foundation
My initial impression is that the meticulously composed frames might make for good photo album material (some of them indeed echo historical album shots), but I quickly realized that the narrative I was spinning to connect these prints of more or less abstract forms of concrete, stone and steel, relies mostly on what each viewer brings to each picture, and what he or she makes of the artist’s captions, which offer a mixture of dry description and lines from songs and poems. I left wondering, what kind of memories are contained in images of historically and culturally laden places?
The fact that September is the month when school starts was not lost on Dawid Radziszewski, who transformed his modestly sized gallery space into a mise-en-scène for a group show titled ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’. With the gallery walls painted in a pattern of blue lines, the impression is that of being trapped inside a giant, squared notebook. A set of objects by four young artists includes a massive drawing compass by Mihuț Boșcu Kafchin, resting on the floor next to an outsized white crayon by Marcin Zarzeka, and an equally out-of-scale pair of scissors by Tomasz Kowalski propped against the window grating. In a short tour of the exhibition, the gallerist introduced each of the objects in a perfectly deadpan tone, finishing with a blank framed page by Lukasz Jastrubczak, which, as he explained, was ‘an A4 size sheet of paper enlarged to A3 size’. Enjoyable? Definitely. Profound? Not necessarily. But the show’s humour is a welcome change from last instalment’s modest show of painting.
Clik here to view.
Dawid Radziszewski at Dawid Radziszewski Gallery
This year’s WGW marked a change of venue for a few galleries, one of them being Piktogram, run by Michał Woliński, which relocated from Praga district to a downtown tenement house, a stone’s throw from the National Gallery Zacheta. Piktogram put together two solo shows that count among the Weekend’s highlights. The emptied top-floor apartment is filled with a host of fantastic characters created by Dorota Jurczak. At the entrance, a painting of an elongated figure, slightly leaning forward, pressed a button, likely a doorbell (Bzzz, 2013). Inside, I examined a glass decanter-like shape with a polymer clay head (Ludwik 6, 2015), while I felt like I was being eyed by two dark, beaked silhouettes hanging on the wall (from the ‘Brahma’ series, 2014–15). The bird is a recurring motif for Jurczak, as are matchsticks that bear characteristic facial features – seen here in a series of lithographs and canvases. Round the corner, on a plinth, sat a family of oversized hand puppets in vivid textile robes, as if they had snuck inside.
Clik here to view.
Above: Dorota Jurczak at Piktogram. Below: Szymon Roginski’s ‘One Eyed Jacks’
Several storeys below, another surreal scenario awaits those who find their way to a shut-down go-go club. The dimly lit interiors – chrome poles, tacky wallpaper and all – were not so much the setting for, as part of ‘One Eyed Jacks’, a selection of photographs by Szymon Roginski. Drawn from a number of his projects over the years, Roginski’s austere, nocturnal views of Polish towns and nondescript rural areas conjure up an uncanny vision of another world whose inhabitants have vanished. The whole situation was a brilliant nod to the eponymous casino-cum-brothel in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
Galeria Leto, another operation that was forced to move out of Soho Factory in Praga, presents a survey of paintings from the last two years by Radek Szlaga. In ‘All the Brutes’, Szlaga looks to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for inspiration, producing an impressive body of work where quotes from the novel and Apocalypse Now and other artists’ output merge with personal, self-reflective themes. The paintings range from suggestively figurative (C. Darwin, 2015) to nearly abstract (Unknown Artist from a Distant County, 2015). In the latter, layers of paint-stained and wrinkled canvas are stitched together into what could be a metaphorical self-portrait, which incorporates a pair of hands, a row of minuscule ape’s and human heads, and a cluster of folders from a digital desktop (‘Apes’, ‘People’, ‘Painters’ – a likely hint at Szlaga’s rich base of visual resources). Much as English for Conrad was a second language he painstakingly mastered to convey his narratives, painting for Szlaga is a chosen, acquired means of communication, in which he continues to develop his own visual vocabulary. It’s exciting to see how in ‘All the Brutes’ Szlaga puts this vocabulary to use, re-telling a tale of colonial past filtered through the lens of today’s culture.
Clik here to view.
Artist Radek Szlaga and gallerist Marta Kolakowska at Leto
At Pola Magnetyczne it’s never a simple in-and-out, not just because the gallery is part of a private home and the hosts make you feel like a welcome guest, but also because the shows there can be so much more rewarding if you take your time and ask questions. This is also true for ‘Colour Music Solfège’, where light forms melodies to the design of artist and polymath Emil Cieslar. French-born Cieslar studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the 1950s, where he later took a teaching post. Together with his wife Elzbieta, he created a number of collaborative works and performances, as well as standing at the helm of the Repassage Gallery from 1973 to 1977, after which the couple relocated to France. It was there that Emil embarked on an investigation of colour theory and synesthesia, which engaged him for three decades. At the heart of this show are two works: Colour Organ, a system of RGB lights that the artist used to perform his scores on a white screen, and the installation Star Music, where, in a similar manner, he played a metaphoric melody of the universe observable on a black star chart. While the works are there for the audience to interact with, the actual scale of Cieslar’s design materialized in his own performances. It’s something you’ve got to listen to.
Clik here to view.
Work by Kijewski & Kocur at Propaganda
Galeria Propaganda hosts an exhibition of captivating sculptures by the duo Kijewski / Kocur, a treat considering you rarely get to see more than a few of their works together at once. In the mid-1980s, Marek Kijewski (who died in 2007), along with Miroslaw Balka and Miroslaw Filonik, co-founded the Swiadomosc Neue Bieremiennost group. A decade later, he established a different collaboration, working with his partner Malgorzata Malinowska, aka Kocur. Toghether they developed a string of works that combined elements of high and popular culture in stark and surprising ways. In ‘Golden Shot’, life-size Lego figures sit alongside rocket-like vibrators dotted with Haribo candy and sprinkled with feathers. There are totem-like objects incorporating fake fur, artificial bull horns and (real) chicken bones, and a toy chest filled with sulphur powder. Golden Shot (1996) – a sculpture of an arrow-pierced heart made of Lego, polyurethane, feathers and 24-carat gold – embodies the perverse tension between lack and excess, sexuality, religion and humour that underlies the duo’s practice.
Clik here to view.
Fragment of the projection of ‘Analysis of Emotions and Vexations’ by Wojciech Bakowski at Stereo
Galeria Stereo has moved, too, but not as far as some of their colleagues; they’re just next door to their previous location (which is presently home to Arton Foundation, which fled Praga…). On view is a recent video by Wojciech Bakowski, this year’s Grand Prix winner at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. The 13-minute-long Analysis of Emotions and Vexations is drawn in pencil, with sections brought to life using classic stop-motion animation. The artist’s monologue leads you through a sequence of scenes in which observations mix with recollections and meandering trains of thought. The film wanders from noisy cafes to wormhole streets that inexplicably connect with places in different cities, to lonely apartments buried in residential districts. In Bakowski’s narrative, vexation mingles with nostalgia and an uneasy sense of impending change. ‘I hope that I am dead before the demolition of these blocks. Or even worse, before the Arab-Russian style turrets get added’, concludes Bakowski as we see a sketchy image of a room with a slowly fading human figure stretched out on the bed.
The WGW featured even more highlights, with solid shows by Ewa Axelrad at BWA Warszawa, Jozef Robakowski at local_30, and new work by Olaf Brzeski on view at Raster. A string of attention-grabbing exhibitions coinciding with WGW are on at public institutions, among them Zofia Rydet’s imposing ‘Record. 1978-1990’ at the Museum of Modern Art and ‘Dust’ at the Centre for Contemporary Art, which brings together artists from Belgium, Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Poland and the United Arab Emirates. The general feeling is that this year’s Warsaw Gallery Weekend was less about publicity and more about art, which made it even more enriching.
Krzysztof Kosciuczuk is a writer based in Warsaw, Poland.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.