Photo courtesy of BWA Zielona Góra
The nostalgic exhibition of early and later works by Łukasz Gorczyca and Michał Kaczyński - artists who went on to found the Raster Gallery in Warsaw in 2001 - celebrates the beginnings of one of Poland's premier contemporary art incubators
Łukasz Gorczyca and Michał Kaczyński made their mark on the Polish art scene by publishing critical texts, using a vocabulary and language that durably influenced art criticism and by publishing the magazine Raster until 1995. In 2000, also at BWA Zielona Góra, they curated a show of members of the Ładnie group: Rafał Bujnowski, Marcin Maciejowski and Wilhelm Sasnal. The Ładnie group – uniting the painters before they became famous, when they were still students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, was a reaction to Poland's capitalist reality after 1989. Raster magazine, known for its expertise in art, described the group’s work as pop-banalism. Between 1996 and 2001 they put on ironic and absurd shows at which they presented paintings, showed films, played music, gave away prizes. For Gorczyca and Kaczyński, the aforementioned exhibition at the BWA was catalyst, as it coincided with the time they decide to abandon their artistic practice for the sake of the development of the Raster gallery.
The works in the current exhibition go back to Raster's earliest stirrings in the 1990s - models, stencils, computer graphics in simple A4 format. Relating to daily life during the artists’ school years, the centerpiece of the exhibition is the D.O.M. POLSKI /Polish House, presented alongside Deo Optimo Maximo which unites their old works with new ones developed especially for the show at the BWA Zielona Góra, as explained in a special publication created by the artists for the event.
Other featured pieces include archive material dating prior to the establishment of the Raster gallery - a volume of poetry, documentation of exhibitions, photographs and issues of Raster andDziewczyny /Girls magazines, all of which were crucial to the creation of their gallery. The opening of the exhibition took place on the 13th of April 2012, accompanied by a concert by Polish jazz musician Marcin Masecki and curated by Marta Czyż and Julia Wielgus.
Director of BWA Zielona Góra Wojciech Kozłowski reminisces on what he witnessed behind the scenes during the beginnings of the Raster Gallery. He says,
Gorczyca and Kaczyński were younger than me by half a generation, with a similar basic memory of the past as I had, although it wasn't quite mature. They didn't have to know (for the sake of appearances - back then) what lay before them. They held a deep conviction that they were starting something new - and in fact they were. I felt at that time that something was happening, something that was somewhat beyond my estimation because of this generation gap.
Galeria BWA Zielona Góra
Al. Niepodległości 19
65-048 Zielona Góra
Tel; 68-325-37-26
bwa@bwazg.pl
www.bwazg.pl
Editor: Marta Jazowska
Source: www.bwazg.pl