Koło Klipsa artists always arranged their exhibition projects for specific spaces, taking their specificity into account. Thus another work of art was created: the exhibition, a result of the extensive organisation of the exhibition space. The exhibition consisted of many individual objects but the goal was to present a new quality. Some Koło Klipsa presentations revealed the intended style of the artistic language the artists used to prepare that entirety.
And so, the second exhibition was intended in the spirit of a popular fête. The third exhibition was visibly geometrical. It also had a particular colour range, limited to four of them: red, green, black and yellow. The fourth exhibition was a 'grocery' one - huge, peculiar still life.
(Mariusz Rosiak)
The projects created as a result of such actions were considered joint works of all the participants. Koło Klipsa group's third exhibition marked an ideological blurring of individual differences, since the artists gave up even showing their names next to individual works. Their team work stood out because of its panache, variety of media, its forms and its meanings. After the formal aescetism dominant in the previous years of conceptualism, the works created by Koło Klipsa reintroduced colour and expressive form to Polish art. It was a true expressionist burst.
Their joint projects transgressed the boundaries of genres and styles, placing themselves somewhere between painting, sculpture and installation - presented in the form of intermedia structures. The spatial compositions of Koło Klipsa brought to mind paintings moving beyond the picture. They could be best named "post-painting sculpture" (the members of the group were painters). In the course of time the group's presentations became more theatrical, as if designed for the stage. Individual elements were built from ready objects taken from everyday life, dusted-off old things, as well as impermanent materials, used, ordinary "civilization waste". Their freedom in using techniques needed to carry out the projects was also present, and the artists often used the expressive qualities of unusual forms of artistic expression, such as earth, ash, mud and feathers.
In the works of the artists from Koło Klipsa intellectual reflection merged with symbols and poetic metaphor. Those symbols and metaphors were difficult to decipher using the code of logic; they were the type of dreamy or fairy-tale matter. The oppositions visible in the works as well as the resulting tensions were inspired by a surrealist world view. Hence the often use of anthropomorphism of form, objects with human features in their works, such as a kneeling table, a boat standing up straight with a hat on its bow, a horse dressed in a suit with a chair draped in muslin on its back, a tree trunk made of coal dust formed into a human hand and set on a lace napkin, or finally a half-moon with lips painted red.
Our idea is that neither close nor distant, neither past nor future, neither sweet nor sour exist. We are speaking about a vast unity in which there is place for all. Our works are not to be understood, to be intellectually discussed. They should be interpreted as you would interpret a meadow, woods, and life. (…) Our works lead fairy tale and fantasy out of reality. They do away with what is called real and unreal, existent and nonexistent. They connect instead of dividing. They point at the relativity of real existence and at the realness of fantasy in reality.
(Koło Klipsa, 1986)
In relation to the work of art and its reception the output of Koło Klipsa group was a particularly refreshing phenomenon. The works in the form of objects and installations worked because of their ambiguity, their openness to diverse readings and interpretations. They seemed familiar and close yet at the same time distant, for they were set in unusual contexts, they were graduated or lacked typical functions. In 1988 Koło Klipsa issued a manifesto titled "Mystical Realism". There Leszek Knaflewski and Krzysztof Markowski wrote:
Illumination as mystical contact with the Absolute is what allows us to live and create. We synthesise mysticism, realism, symbol and irony as a form of distance. The right of our thinking is the right to metamorphosis which allows the transformation of everything into nearly everything.
Members of the group:
- Leszek Knaflewski, b. 1960;
Wojciech Kujawski, b. 1959. Left the group in 1986;
Mariusz Kruk, b. 1952. Left the group in 1987;
Krzysztof Markowski, b. 1957;
Piotr Kurka, b. 1958. Left the group in 1985.
Exhibitions:
- 1984 - three exhibitions at Wielka Gallery, Poznań;
- 1985 - Foksal Gallery, Warsaw;
- 1985 - BWA, Bydgoszcz;
- 1985 - Teatr Polski (paint-shop stage), Poznań;
- 1986 - Wielka Gallery, Poznań;
- 1986 - Krzysztofory Gallery, Kraków;
- 1986 - "Figury i przedmioty" / "Figures and Objects", CRP Orońsko (group exhibition);
- 1987 - BWA Gallery, Szczecin;
- 1987 - New Art Biennial, Zielona Góra;
- 1987 - "Group-Art-Work", Documenta, Kassel;
- 1988 - "Świeżo malowane" / "Wet Paint", Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw (group exhibition);
- 1988 - "Polish Realities", Third Eye Centre, Glasgow (group exhibtion);
- 1989 - Promocyjna Gallery, Warsaw;
- 1990 - "Galerie lat 80." / "Galleries of the 1980s", Zachęta Gallery, Warsaw (group exhibition).
Author: Ewa Gorządek, July 2010. Translated by: Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, September 2010.