In his art Polish artist Pawel Althamer combines the visual experience with suggestive socially-minded messages. His artistic practice is based on a participative approach to art, founded on the belief that art can impart change. Since Althamer’s focus is on the communicative and community-forming power of art, some of his works leave hardly any material trace, based on the live sculptural and performative traditions.
He studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts between 1988-1993, earning a degree in sculpture under Prof Grzegorz Kowalski. In 1991, he began exhibiting his works, along with colleagues from the Kowalski studio, including Katarzyna Kozyra, Jacek Markiewicz and Jacek Adamas. He was a co-founder of the Kowalnia ("Smithy") group, a leading collective of young Polish artists in the 1990s. In 2004, Althamer received the prestigious Vincent Van Gogh Biannual Award, founded by the Broere Charitable Foundation of the Netherlands.
Sculpture Portraits
From the beginning of his artistic career, Althamer worked in various media, from classic performance techniques, happenings and "action" art to the discipline he founded his education on: sculpture. A number of his installations have used sculpture as an element of the piece, such as the self-portrait he submitted as his Master's project at the Academy - Paweł Althamer, 1993 to the balloon likeness of the author suspended above the city of Milan - Balloon, 2007. The materials he employs may often be atypical for the medium, but there is often a reference to the roots of his art education. Sculpture in the hands of Althamer carries a totemic or fetishistic quality - it is no accident that a 1991 trip to Africa played a major role in shaping the artist's creative personality. His early works Standing Figure, 1991; Nature Study, 1991 made out of grass, straw, animal hides and innards are a testament to this influence, particularly the hyper-realist portrait of the artist that was part of his Master's project. The work itself carries a double message, referring to both the age-old academic requirement to demonstrate the artist's artistic ability to create mimetic representations of reality, but also serving as a literal substitute for the author at the defence. The figure was to stand in for Althamer before the committee of professors while the artist himself left the room. A video was played showing the artist leaving the academy, heading towards the woods to strip off his clothes and "commune with nature" while the figure remained. A similar technique was used in the depiction of Althamer's family members, e.g. Paweł and Monika (2002) and Weronika (2001), a figure of a girl standing in a barn in an Alpine village, a girl's skull inside the figure's head. In 2006, he also created a small-scale sculpture of his newborn son, along with several miniature models of reality that resemble doll houses in the years following, including a replica of the Foksal Gallery Foundation office, employees included). For a few years, he and his wife earned their living making rag dolls which they sold through souvenir and toy stores. Today, he continues to teach ceramics workshops for Grupa Nowolipie, a group of patients suffering from multiple sclerosis and other diseases.
Altered States of Being
Althamer's sculptures emphasise the organic nature and physicality of the human body, along with its impermanence and the temporary nature of man's existence. His technique counterbalances his search for alternative ways of experiencing reality, discovering an "inner life" and "altered states of being" mostly through ascetic isolation, but also with the help of narcotics or hallucinogenic substances. In his 1990 work Connection of Two Points, he and fellow student Mikołaj Miodowski attempted to play a telepathic game of chess In the 1990s, especially during his student days, Althamer conducted numerous (often lengthy) performances that involved radical sensory deprivation.
In a 1993 interview given to fellow artist Artur Żmijewski, Althamer said,
When the rehearsal takes place in public, it becomes a spectacle, a means of communicating one's exploration and that weakens the experience. I lose sight of the question and start to transmit a response. My most powerful experiences occur beyond art, beyond creation, and they are utterly spontaneous events.