"Wystawa Okolicznościowa" / "Circumstantial Exhibition" is a pioneer venture which presents, for the first time, four juxtaposed art group attitudes and the profiles of a dozen artists associated with Łódź, Poznań, Wrocław and Warsaw.
The formations brought together in the exhibition have all shaped the Polish art world of that time. They issued their own fanzines, organised campaigns, performances and meetings. At the times of social paralysis their intensified activity was astonishing. Their works - tools of political battle of those days, are today highly sought after collectibles. In spite of being stripped of their purely political context they have justified their artistic quality by gaining a high market value. Although their meaning has always been appreciated, never before, have they been on display together.
Łódź Kaliska functions in a invariable line-up: Marek Janiak, Andrzej Kwietniewski, Adam Rzepecki, Andrzej Świetlik and Makary (Andrzej Wielogórski).The group was established in 1979 in its namesake town, Łódź. Formed in 1979 under an air of scandal, it was originally a neo-vanguard art group with an aim of exploring the photo-media aspect of seeing and reception that originated within Conceptualism, in the domain of photography, experimental film and performance. In 1980-81 the group changed its focus more on Dada-ist happenings and a message of Surrealist anarchism. This agenda sought to attack and ridicule the Polish Neo-Vanguard scene as well as depict the absurdity of life under socialism.
Gruppa as an artistic formation was founded in 1983 by six painters of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts: Ryszard Grzyb, Paweł Kowalewski, Jarosław Modzelewski, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Marek Sobczyk and Ryszard Woźniak. Together they exhibited provocative paintings and drawings (including the collectively produced gigantic works on paper called "papiery") staged numerous performances, and published their own bulletin. In 1989, Gruppa's activity - strangely enough never based on a coherent programme, came to an end with a work painted on a wooden billboard in front of an election center in Warsaw as an advertisement for Solidarity. Today, as the artists pursue their individual careers, the connections among them are only tenuous. What originally distinguished the Gruppa members from other contemporary artists was not the style of their works, inspired by the German Neue Wilde and Italian transavanguardia and adopted by many young Polish artists, it was rather their overtly declared refusal to reduce the Solidarity-led struggle for freedom to yet another heroic episode in Poland's ongoing effort to rid itself of foreign domination and establish democracy. Rather, they wanted to de-mythologise and examine the struggle using irony, pastiche, the language of aggressive signs, and the visual syntax of posters.
Luxus came from Wrocław, active in the years of 1983-1995. Its members would come and go over the years but some of its most prolific members were: Paweł Jarodzki (group's leader and the author of its name), Ewa Ciepielewska and Bożena Grzyb-Jarodzka, as well as Jerzy Kosałka, Marek Czechowski, Artur Gołacki, Małgorzata Plata, Stanisław Sielicki, Jacek Jankowski, Szymon Lubiński, Andrzej Jarodzki, Krzysztof Kubiak and Krzysztof Kłosowicz (Kaman). The premise was to create art which was popular, simple to make and accessible to everyone, in sheer contrast to the, at the time, strong trend of avantgarde academic art, especially the conceptual art. They would draw inspiration from the Western standards of mass culture, pop-art. They adopted creative freedom, pastiche, the technique of dadaistic collages and stencils.
Koło Klipsa was active in the years of 1983-1990 in Poznań. Its initiator was Mariusz Kruk, and the classic assembly, apart from him, was composed of Leszek Knaflewski, Krzysztof Markowski and Wojciech Kujawski. The Koła Klipsa artists drew their inspiration from the New Expressionism, popular in Europe at that time, as well as surrealism, matter painting, pop-art, land-art, art of Duchamp and the Fluxus movement. They created exhibitions that created an entire artistic 'environment' with its own characteristic ambiance. The group was an example of artists who tried to find a free space for themselves in the area of art, somewhere out of the mainstream such as neo-Avant-guard, church art, academic traditions and works subject to national ideology. Between 1988-1989 the artist also worked with the Neue Bieremiennost group.
The exhibition runs between the 17th of December 2011 till the 14th of January 2012.
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Source: press materials