Artistic news

[Bonobo]

Polish director wins Europe Theater Prize
Poland.pl
2009-04-05

Theater director Krystian Lupa is the first Pole to receive the Europe Theater Prize, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the theater industry. The award ceremony is to be held at the Polish Theater in Wroc³aw this evening.

Known as the theater Oscar, the Europe Theater Prize was first given in 1986 under the auspices of the European Commission. Supported by numerous art institutions such as The Union of the Theatres of Europe, The European Theatre Convention, and UNESCO's International Theatre Institute, the enterprise is intended to promote cultural integration in Europe.

The Polish director has received many international awards for his artistic output, including the French Critics' Award, the Austrian Cross of Merit, and the French Order of the Fine Arts and Humanities.

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Poland's forgotten El Greco
4/5/09

WARSAW (AFP) — It was discovered more than 40 years ago in a rural Polish parish. But today the El Greco masterpiece, the Ecstasy of St Francis, still awaits the recognition worthy of a Spanish renaissance master.

"This painting is still ignored by European and American art historians," says Izabella Galicka, 78, who discovered the painting.

"An El Greco in Poland? Found in a priest's quarters in the countryside? It just seems too improbable," says Galicka summing up the views she believes many hold.

"It's a great pity as this valuable canvas deserves recognition, " adds Galicka, now retired from her position at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN).

No world-class El Greco specialist has ever visited the tiny provincial museum of the Siedlce diocese in eastern Poland where the painting has been on display for the last four years.

El Greco and his students painted more than a hundred different scenes of St Francis. The canvas discovered in Poland dated between 1575 and 1580 shows the saint with the stigmata.

Scouring the Polish countryside for works of art in 1964, Galicka and colleague Hanna Sygietynska found the canvas in the tiny rural parish of Kosow Lacki.

"If a door had not been left ajar that day we would never have noticed it," she recalls. "Sooty and darkened by time, the painting was hanging on a wall over a sofa in a priest's small chamber," she recalls.

"Good Lord! I exclaimed when I saw it. Straight away I knew it was a masterpiece. The stroke of the brush, the gaze of the subject, the colours, all like El Greco."

Initially the two women identified the canvas measuring 104 x 75 centimetres (3.4 x 2.4 feet) as belonging to the El Greco school. But following a comparative study, they boldly theorised the painting was indeed the work of the master himself.

Their thesis was confirmed in 1974. Conservation work by the renowned Polish-born art restorer Bohdan Marconi revealed the authentic signature of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, the real name of "El Greco", an ethnic Greek born in Crete.

It was covered by a layer of paint on which an art dealer trying to pass the painting off as a work of the Dutch master Van Dyck had clumsily forged the signature "Van Dijck," sometimes used by the artist himself, says Galicka.

Having understood the value of the painting, the church quickly hid it for fear that Poland's then communist regime would confiscate it.

Only two clergymen knew its location, Galicka recalls. "Some even thought it had been sold or transferred to the Vatican," she said.

In 2004, 15 years after the collapse of communism, the work finally went on the display behind a sheet of bullet-proof glass. It is estimated to be worth in excess of five million dollars.

"It is perhaps all the controversy surrounding the mystery of its disappearance that still brings up doubts about the canvas," says Dorota Pikula, curator of the Siedlce museum.

"We could understand these doubts when the canvas was not on display, but not anymore. In four years not one renowned El Greco experts from Europe or the US has taken an interest. No mention is made of it in specialist literature," she adds.

Around 10,000 visitors, however, do make the trip to Siedlce every year.

In March Poland's President Lech Kaczynski officially awarded Galicka and Sygietynska high state honours for their historic discovery.

The Siedlce museum is hopeful that recognition might also spark interest among the world art community.

[Bonobo]

Sculptures by Polish Artist Gregor Gaida on View at Galerie Adler

Gregor Gaida, "Teilen und Herrschen", 2005. Painted wood, concrete. Each ca. 160 x 240 x 130. Photo; Courtesy: Galerie Adler.

FRANKFURT AM MAIN.- Quantum physics postulates that a particle can follow every possible path in space-time on its way from one place to another and thus live through every possible story. Each of these possibilities describes one story and the sum of all these stories results in the only 'probable' path while each possible story holds a probability of its own. Gregor Gaida (*1975 Chorzów, Poland) has taken on this scientific onset and transferred it to life and art. In his philosophical approach of 'sum of histories', he describes the theory of human action as the consequence of the sum of all past events.

In his sculptures, Gaida literally gives shape to this approach and tells stories without writing them out. They are allegories of the contemporary that in their openness and elusiveness suggest different possibilities of a story.

Contradictions in current and historical context and in social value systems generate concepts that condense to imagery. As scrutinizing observer, he documents persons facing a personal decision and, at these crossroads, logs every detail of their mimic and gestures. His sculptures depict singular moments that implicate not only the sum of causes but all possibilities arising from this moment.

In 'Lateral III' the artist merges positively charged components like the motive of the child, the colour white and the pureness of washing powder. Their sum and constellation, however, produce a negative effect and irritate the viewer. Here, the crated image wavers between attraction and repulsion. Something similar happens in 'Kind und Kreide' ('Child and Chalk') which seems to feature the theme of childhood's innocence and purity. Only upon the second, closer look of the viewer, the seemingly playful scene unfolds to its whole extent: In absolute equality the playing children mutate to adversaries who consciously set themselves apart from each other.

The narrative character of the figurative in Gaida's works is always strongly pronounced and the characters whose anatomic minutiae and physiognomies are defined in detail seem strangely animate. A classic and timeless impression is also given by the lightly glazed wood which finds frequent application besides other materials such as aluminium, polyester and acrylic resin. Apart from the delicate wood grain, knotholes and small irregularities shine through the white glazed surface of skin, hair and clothes. Their inner substance which in itself holds an organic vitality is revealed and imparts Gaida's figurines with their ambivalent livelihood.

Gregor Gaida merges approaches from photography and painting to form inimitable sculptures. His objects may be seen as three-dimensional snapshots as the protagonists are cropped at their imaginary image borders and wrest away from their original frame of action. It is this fragmentary character that prompts the viewer to fathom themselves the 'sum of stories'.

The show runs from January 16 through March 6, 2010 at Galerie Adler.

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Spatial Installation by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant in Warsaw



People walk near an art installation, Project (...), in the center of Warsaw January 5, 2010. The project by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant is installed in a symbolic place, over Chlodna street, where during the Second World War there stood the "footbridge", a wooden overpass above the Aryan part of the city linking the two parts of the Jewish Ghetto. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel

WARSAW.- Project (...) is a spatial installation project that fits well with the educational mission of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, best described by the idea "open past" and based on a dialogue of multiple narratives on the subject of the joint Polish-Jewish history, cultivating the memory of coexistence of cultures, but also inviting to critical reflection, without evasion of taboo topics. Conceptual work by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant, perceived by them as a kind of "linguistic sculpture" which picks up on the theme of "memory work" in Polish modern art, and explores the boundaries of Warsaw’s contemporary identity, a city for which void and absence are the basic categories of description. The Second World War, during which one third of Warsaw’s inhabitants perished, including near entire Jewish population, put an end to the city’s centuries-long multicultural reality. There disappeared for ever from her urban landscape the architecture of synagogues and from her streets the sounds of Yiddish.

(…), an ephemeral sculpture that defies the laws of gravity was installed in a symbolic place, over Chłodna street, where during the Second World War there stood the “footbridge”, a wooden overpass above the Aryan part of the city linking the Large Ghetto with the Small Ghetto. The taboo subject the authors of (…) wish to bring up is that of awareness of Poles that mass murder of Jews happened before their very eyes; the inexpressible traumatic experience that casts a shadow on relations between Jews and Poles to this day.

(…) can appear wherever there are unsolvable problems and near inexpressible subjects. (…) is a punctuation mark that represents: "skipping over or omission in a text, a broken thought, a missing element". As conceived by the authors, (…) crosses the boundaries of history; is travelling installation, a sign for hire; empty space that focuses attention on a taboo that actually exists in memory and culture. The shining surfaces of the balloons will reflect back every element or discourse that nears them.

Commenting on their work, the authors said: The project for us is a catalyst of different, often mutually exclusive meanings. For us art, as opposed to didacticism and politics, is not a mouthpiece or a speaking tube, a presentation of hand-me-down views. We would like to see this art instigate new and unpredictable social situations and touch the things long relegated to collective subconscious in Warsaw’s urban space, so saturated with the traumatic past and so taboo-ridden.
The project is complemented by a cycle of open public debates taking which will be devoted to such topics as: the strategy of absence of memory in Warsaw, the glamour aesthetics as a vehicle for taboo content, the conceptual art, history and irony.

The urban project (…) is also addressed to the local community, the present inhabitants of Chłodna street for whom this may be the first collective experience and an encounter with their street’s Jewish past, hopefully an impulse to building neighbourly relations based on recognition of their street’s history and identity.

www.artdaily.com

[Bonobo]

Poland’s Ministry of Culture has made dramatic cuts in state funding for a number of Krakow's cultural festivals, depriving several noted international events of a single cent.

Amongst the festivals hit are sonic extravaganzas such as Sacrum Profanum, Unsound and Misteria Paschalia.

According to the organizers of the latter, who invite international ensembles to perform in Krakow's churches during Holy Week, the decision contradicts promises made by the Ministry that the sum would remain the same for a three year period. The festival will lose 780,000 zloty backing annually (193,000 euro).

The move has focused hopes on the city itself, following concerns that a number of events would have to be cancelled outright.

"The situation is very difficult," Magda Sroka, vice mayor of Krakow, told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.

'The good will of Mr President will be necessary, and an intervention in the reserve budget. But even then we will not be in the position to lay out a double quota, one from ourselves and one covering the ministry.'

Besides Sacrum Profanum, Unsound and Misteria Paschalia, other events struck by the cuts include Jazz Juniors, Music in Old Krakow, Art Boom and the Grechuta Song Festival.

The first city session discussing the new challenges took place yesterday.

[Bonobo]

Pole among ‘10 most important artists’
13.06.2011
The US edition of Newsweek has championed Polish video artist Artur Zmijewski as one of the ten most important artists at large in the world today.

The weekly declared that Zmijewski's harrowing videos “reveal life's brutal truths.”

While acknowledging that the artist's works are painfully hard to watch, the magazine stressed that, “they are also profound and important and even humane, in the same way Goya's brutalities are.”

The Warsaw-born talent has pointed his lens at many provocative subjects, including a naked amputee being clutched by another man, a lady dying from bone disease and a deaf choir attempting to sing Bach.

“Why not help deaf people sing Bach, regardless of the ugly results?” the weekly writes.

“Why flinch at pain seen up close?”

Zmijewski, who is now 45, studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts and made his first solo exhibition abroad at Leipzig in 2003. Two year later he represented Poland at the Venice Biennale.

A critic of the gung-ho capitalism that has gripped Poland since the fall of the Iron Curtain, he describes the new system as "a kind of virus that infects each mind—people didn't expect the dark side to this freedom."

[Bonobo]

Poles apart

By Jackie Wullschlager


Works in Tadeusz Kantor’s ‘Everything is Hanging by a Thread’ series (1973)

The Power of Fantasy, which opened yesterday at BOZAR in Brussels, is the best contemporary art exhibition I have encountered anywhere this year. It has rooms dedicated to two of Europe’s most thrilling young painters, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski and Wilhelm Sasnal, a new installation by the eccentrically brilliant Pawel Althamer, fresh insights into several heavyweight conceptualists – Miroslaw Balka, Monika Sosnowska – and diverse works in mixed media by artists acclaimed and unknown. Oh – and all are Polish, although this show is effortlessly world-class.

A resurgence of national identity within the global art scene is a characteristic of our times; the Polish phenomenon compels as an example but is also unique. The artists here are acutely aware of that, and riff on the artifice of remaking history and the ironies of nostalgia. Piotr Uklanski’s apparently spontaneous, loud photographs “Solidarnosc” were created by stage-managing a cast of 30,000 in red and white to form the famous trade union logo at the Gdansk shipyard where the end of communism began. Robert Kusmirowski’s silent monochrome “D.O.M” unnervingly copies a grey small-town cemetery in cardboard, wood and polystyrene – an illusionist game in a culture of image distrust and manipulation.

Indisputably, precise historical circumstance created this exceptional generation. Now in their thirties and forties, these artists grew up during communist rule but came of age in democratic Poland. They cast a contrarian, doubting eye on all systems, and share an unswerving engagement with reality underpinned by an absurdist world view, as embodied by the terrific opening piece, Althamer’s “Brodno People”: a parade of life-size silver-sprayed mannequins fashioned, with the help of local residents, from salvage materials to resemble characters from a poor Warsaw suburb, and attached to a frame with wheels. Althamer’s simple transformations – a tin man with a dustbin body and drainpipe legs; a rusty skeleton with washing machine drum for head, carrying a silver birch staff – gives this assemblage of battered figures the resonance of a mythical procession, Everyman’s journey through life.

As engrossing is the first painting gallery, dominated by Ziolkowski’s two-metre “The Great Battle under the Table” – a canvas covered edge to edge with depictions of hundreds of tiny figures in uniform, stylised as toy soldiers, commanded by a ludicrous, slightly bigger figure, a child dressed as Napoleon atop a velvet chair. In a flawlessly controlled composition, this teeming battleground is divided by outsize bizarreries – a cauldron, a shoe propped up by a canvas crawling with a salamander and a skeleton – but reduced to nursery scale by its location beneath a table whose surface displays a much larger still life of potted plants, insects and a magician’s hat. Jewel-like and lavishly detailed, this in turn is framed by red curtains, tied with a pair of skeletons: a universe in miniature, meaningless, chaotic, yet abundant, painted with crystalline delicacy in short precise strokes, and touched with enchantment and death.
‘The Young Want Neither to Study nor to Work’ (2000) by Marcin Maciejowski


‘The Young Want Neither to Study nor to Work’ (2000) by Marcin Maciejowski

According to BOZAR’s quotation from Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, an art of the absurd was a way of confronting “the greatest fantasy of the [20th] century that was communist utopianism”. This was already true in the 1920s of Soviet writers such as Daniil Kharms, though a central European literature of the absurd is deeply ingrained, both predating communism (Kafka) and surviving into exile (Nabokov), Günter Grass, who was born in Gdansk when it was Danzig. Indeed “The Great Battle under the Table” viscerally recalls the mad/true world observed by three-year-old Oskar from his perspective under the table in Grass’s The Tin Drum.

In Poland, the seminal 20th-century artist in this field was Tadeusz Kantor. His “Trumpet of the Last Judgment” (1979) – a black canvas-wrapped trumpet perched on a rickety pram, with burnt flags and a bucket to catch the rejected souls tumbling into the abyss – is a perfect example of poetic sculpture created from what he called “reality of the lowest rank”. It is displayed here alongside Balka’s “500x40x40”, a column composed of salt and wooden floor tiles resurrected from Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery, where Kantor showed.

In other company, the Balka could look severe or dreary, but the juxtaposition with Kantor lends it expressive energy, brings out its drama of the fragility of attempts to dream infinity, and – in the works’ common use of poor materials – emphasises the strange meeting ground between magic realism and conceptualism. Monika Sosnowska’s painted steel and MDF sculptures, referencing the construction of emerging democratic Poland, acquire resonance in this context too.



‘Brodno People’ (2010) by Pawel Althamer

The other outstanding artist here is Wilhelm Sasnal. Celebrated for his idiosyncratic, accomplished handling of paint – dripped, impasto, applied with his fingers – he depicts myriad subjects but BOZAR confirms him as a European history painter in the intellectual tradition of Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans. “Partisans” is a series on the Polish patriots who fought the Nazis and then the Soviets; it includes close-up fragmented portraits pared down from photographic sources, and a seductive canvas which at first suggests a sensuous swirling green abstraction crossed with thick black horizontals. These turn out to be branches of trees from which the heroes’ dissolving bodies hang.

In London, “I, Culture”, a Polish arts festival marking Poland’s European Union presidency, opens next week. New paintings by Sasnal are showing at Sadie Coles gallery: of particular interest are exquisitely executed canvases depicting socialist-realist style stone effigies of a Madonna and child. In one, fragments are surreally eaten away as a verdant green ground encroaches on the kneeling mother; in another, a black backcloth partly effaces the statue, as if by digital eraser. Underlying the political, psychological, religious implications – fading of communist icons, compromises of motherhood, Poland’s intense relationship with Catholicism – is a twist to the Renaissance paragon by which painters rivalled sculptors with trompe l’oeil depictions of statues.

Meanwhile, an excellent exhibition at Parasol Unit demonstrates how many motifs – overgrown vegetation, enlarged insects, dissected body parts, dancing skeletons, the magic hat – compressed into “The Great Battle” form the visual lexicon of the prodigious Ziolkowski. He is riveting at small scale. A depiction of a cemetery at ground level, crawling with snails and beetles alongside urns and animated plants, with an insect-sized self-portrait of the artist hurrying by with a blank canvas, is a minor masterpiece. So is a memorial to his mother as a pair of bones and pink hands enclosing two eyeballs, overlaid with filigree flowers. Among complex larger pieces, “The Mystery of Neocortex” – a Nazi sawing through a brain, surrounded by an orgy – and “Milk and Honey”, a fraught landscape of doodled breasts spurting a yellow-russet river, suggest that here is a significant heir to surrealism for the age of neuroscience and biotechnology.

‘The Power of Fantasy’, BOZAR, Brussels, to September 18; ‘Wilhelm Sasnal’, Sadie Coles, London W1, to August 27; ‘Jakub Julian Ziolkowski: In Utero’, Parasol Unit, London N1, to July 29

[Bonobo]

Second thoughts over Lady’s journey?
20.07.2011 13:03
The Czartoryski Foundation is said to be reconsidering its decision to send Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece ‘Lady with an Ermine’ to an exhibition at the National Gallery in London in November.



According to the Krakow daily Dziennik Polski, this follows Sunday’s incident in which two paintings by Nicholas Poussin, one of the most important French painters of the 17th century, were sprayed with red paint by a vandal at the National Gallery.

Olga Jaros, the newly-appointed chairwoman of the Czartoryski Foundation, which owns the ‘Lady with an Ermine’, told the daily that the Foundation has been closely monitoring the incident and its aftermath.

“It was an act of vandalism, which we all deplore. However, Leonardo’s Lady is protected by a special case and so any paint-spraying is out of the question,” she said, adding that the final decision on sending the painting to London will be preceded by a thorough debate between members of both the Foundation’s Board and Council.

[Bonobo]

Cracow, 15.10.2011 - 08.01.2012

The exhibition marks the first time that William Turner’s works have gone on show in Poland.

The works on loan from the Tate Britain collection, classified as particularly valuable for the British culture, leave the UK very infrequently. It is beyond question, then, that it will be an extraordinary event for connoisseurs and a wider public alike.

Turner was mainly active as a landscape painter and he elevated this genre to the height of its eminence and made it a universal means of pictorial expression. His numerous journeys across Europe provided him with motifs and themes, the most prominent of which is the one connected with light, which Turner painted using clear colours, trying to level the difference between colour and form.

The exhibition will feature a selection of Turner’s paintings divided into five theme groups: “Fire” (images such as the sunset in the Burning of Parliament), “Water” (representations of the sea, water, the coast as well as rivers and lakes, “Air” (studies of clouds and various meteorological phenomena), “Earth” (paintings of mountains, caves, rocks and glaciers) and the final part “A Fusion of the Elements”. ...more.