Paulina Olowska's Mszana Dolna project, 2010
Paulina Olowska along with the works by artists from both East and West Europe describe the collapse of Communism and offer a series of personal reportages on aspects of life under the Communist system and the new post-Soviet countries, the works are on display at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City
The New Museum presents Ostalgia an exhibition that brings together the work of fifty-six artists from twenty countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Republics, and parts of Western Europe. Contesting the format of a conventional geographical survey, the exhibition includes works by Polish artists Mirosław Balka, Paulina Ołowska and Marysia Lewandowska (with Neil Cummings), Joseph Robakowski and is co-created by the Film Form Workshop.
The films by Polish workers rescued and archived by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska are presented in dialogue with Mirosław Batka's uncanny reinterpretation of religious sculpture. He shows a sculpture of his unorthodox religious - the Czarny papież i czarna owca / Black Pope and the black sheep (1987), after closer examination, it turns out that the pope is crying and his tears form rich streams.
Some works are presented in rigid ensembles, duplicating a sort of bureaucratic organisation based on grids, lines, large catalogs such as Aneta Grzeszykowska's family album, in which she erases herself from every picture.
The exhibition also features Polish artist Paulina Ołowska who transports the decorations of an old Polish puppet theatre to New York. The artist creates an installation that stretches along the lobby walls and windows of the New Museum. Recreating a public mural project she painted in 2010 in Mszana Dolna. The small rural town is the location of a spa for children that was built under Socialist rule that has remained inactive for many years, until it was recently restored and re-opened with the assistance of members of the local community. The public murals in Mszana Dolna consist of reproductions of decorative images from the children's puppet theatre at the spa.
Paulina Olowska will also participate in a public programme in the New Museum's theatre along with Massimiliano Gioni, the exhibition's organising curator.
Seen in their New York debut, the collage paintings of the young Polish artist Paulina Olowska hit all the right notes, mainly that of a low-tech, post-Warholian harshness that mingles large-scale appropriated-image collage and paint while disdaining finish and technique.
- Roberta Smith, The New York Times (2007)
Other artists presenting their works about the Eastern Bloc include Vladimir Arkhipov, Helga Paris, Dmitri Prigov, Erik Bulatov, Miroslaw Balka, Boris Mikhailov, Jozef Robakowski's Workshop of the Film form and many more. The exhibition also includes works produced by artists from Western Europe and the United States in order to explore how art and artists have depicted the reality and the myth of the East.
Twenty years ago, a process of dissolution began, leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic republics to the Balkans, from Central Europe to Central Asia, entire regions and nations were reconfigured, their constitutions rewritten, their borders redrawn. Combining seminal figures and emerging artists, Ostalgia looks at the art produced in and about some of these countries. Mixing private confessions and collective traumas, the exhibition traces how individuals and entire societies must negotiate new relationships to history, geography, and ideology after the fall of the Soviet Bloc.
Rediscovering local avant-garde practices and exposing international affinities, composing an imaginary landscape, tracing the cartography of a dream that haunted the East, for ultimately it is about myths and their demise. Some of the works in Ostalgia offer personal reportages on aspects of life under Communism and in the new post-Soviet countries. Composed as a visual archive, the exhibition pays particular attention to the unique place that artists came to occupy in Socialist countries, acting simultaneously as outcasts, visionaries, and witnesses. The exhibition includes works produced by Western European artists who have depicted the reality and myth of the East. It is more concerned with a state of mind than a specific place in time.
Paulina Olowska (b. 1976, Gdansk), is a multimedia artist living and working in Warsaw. Her paintings, murals, and performances often reference Pop art, graffiti, and Soviet propaganda. She frequently applies the procedures of the Western avant-garde-particularly of Dada and Pop art-to the popular iconography of pre-1989 Poland, creating startling mélanges of East and West. In one series, for example, she used the collage techniques of Robert Rauschenberg and the Nouveaux Réalistes on Polish rock posters and political ephemera from the 1980s.
Ostalgia is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions, with Jarrett Gregory, Assistant Curator.
The exhibition opens at the New Museum on the 14th of July and runs through the 25th of September 2011.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring contributions by Ekaterina Degot, Massimiliano Gioni, Boris Groys, Viktor Misiano, Joanna Mytkowska, and Bojana Pejić as well as texts by a selection of the exhibiting artists.
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum was conceived as a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world.
The exhibition is organised by The New Museum and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York.
NewMuseum
235 Bowery
New York, NY
newmuseum.org
Polish Artists:
Paulina Olowska
Born in 1976 in Gdansk
Lives in Warsaw
Aneta Grzeszykowska
Born in 1974 in Warsaw
Lives in Warsaw
Mirosław Bałka
Born in 1958 in Otwock
Lives in Otwock
Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska
Born in 1947 in Aberdare, UK; Born in 1955 in Szczecin.
Live in London, UK
For more information on the exhibition and a full artist list see: www.newmuseum.org
Source: press materials