Painting & Screaming: Poland’s Visual Arts in 2021
From a visual arts perspective, the pandemic became obsolete in 2021. Although experimenting with virtual displays and creations was collectively abandoned in Poland, the return to old habits did not equal stagnation. The year 2021 was the time of oneiric painting, socially-engaged art and historical re-evaluations.
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'Smuggling of Biomaterials' by Sergey Shabohin and Paweł Matyszewski, (Car Door /BMW E6-43R-00048), 2019, a part of 'Z peryferii' (From the periphery) exhibition, Bałtycka Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej, Galeria Kameralna, CAT, photo: Krzysztof Tomasik/courtesy of the Gallery and the artists
Even though art life had to slow down a bit due to the pandemic, one swift and prominent change did take place. More than ever, the Polish art world opened up to the work of foreign artists and those belonging to ethnic minorities. A couple of years ago, there was an overflow of projects linked to the celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Polish independence so Poland and Polishness were themes displayed throughout the whole art world. Warsaw attracted artists from behind both its eastern and western borders. For a change, in 2021 we praised the works of artists from Belarus and Ukraine living in Poland, who were like a breath of fresh air for the stuffy Polish art world.
The credit for this sudden openness is due to the group behind the publication of ZA*ZIN – a zine of foreign artists living in Poland. Yuriy Billy, Yulia Krivich and Vera Zalutskaya did the organic work of mapping the communities of artists from other countries that are currently in Poland. The effects of their work are evident, for example, we could see them during 2021’s Warsaw Gallery Weekend. In Biuro Wystaw this year, we could visit an exhibition of artists representing Belarusian, Romani, Jewish and Ukrainian identities. One of the participants, Ala Savasevich, was honoured with a Fundacja Sztuki Polskiej ING (ING Polish Art Foundation) award. Romani artists are also more and more prominent in Polish galleries and museums, for example, Krzysztof Gil and Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, who started 2021 with the solo exhibition Wyjście z Egiptu (Exit from Egypt) in Arsenał Gallery in Białystok and finished the year winning the exhibition design contest for the Polish pavilion during the upcoming Venice Biennale.
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Plein-air art event Opolno 2071, photo: Alicja Kochanowicz
Our connections to neighbouring countries in Central Europe also got stronger. Spring saw the launch of Secondary Archive, an online archive compiling the works of several generations of contemporary female artists from Central and Eastern Europe. Created in collaboration with the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, Easttopics from Hungary, MeetFactory from Czechia and Björnsonova from Slovakia, the idea of the platform was born back in 2019 but, materialising during a time of limited travel, it turned out to be even more needed than expected.
Working with female artist archives was also the basis of Kocham w Życiu Trzy Rzeczy: Samochód, Alkohol, Marynarzy (I Love Three Things in Life: The Car, Alcohol, Sailors) organised in the lokal_30 gallery by students of the Faculty of Visual Culture Management of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts: Dobromiła Dobro, Agnieszka Kalita, Hanna Kraś, Agata Ostrowska, Agata Plater-Zyberk and Katarzyna Trzeciak under the supervision of Marika Kuźmicz. The exhibition presented pieces by over a dozen of the hundreds of women who studied at the Warsaw Academy in the Interwar period (back when it was the School of Fine Arts). The exhibition not only presented the artists’ forgotten works but also how much of art history is ‘a dark matter’ as all that remained from the lives of the majority of these women were some scraps of documents in the academy’s archives. Even those with the biggest perseverance, talent and luck were forced to give up ‘pure’ artistic practice for the sake of earning money through designing books, glassware or ceramics in order to survive.
The year 2021 was also the time of reinterpretations of seemingly well-known stories. In Opolno-Zdrój, was an outdoor exhibition called Opolno 2071. It paid homage to Plener Ziemia Zgorzelecka (plein-air painting in Ziemia Zgorzelecka), a ground-breaking initiative in the world of ecologically-engaged art from half a century ago, now forgotten by art historians. Today, this event from 50 years ago inspires us to reflect upon the role of art in the face of quickly accelerating climate change.
Elsewhere, a fascinating dialogue about post-war art was created by two exhibitions in Warsaw:
Henryk Streng / Marek Włodarski and Jewish-Polish Modernism at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Piotr Słodkowski, and Cold Revolution: Central and Eastern European Societies in Times of Socialist Realism, 1948–1959 at Zachęta Gallery curated by Joanna Kordjak and Jérôme Bazin. Presenting two different perspectives, they debunked the myth of the Manichean fight between modernism and socrealism as good and evil, bold experiment and political propaganda. They showed post-war art developing in the new Cold War times as a mix of various identities, ideas and aesthetics.
Returning to the topic of online archives, one is not enough. If people assumed the pandemic and the subsequent closing of art institutions would become an impulse to create new virtual ways of exhibiting art that would break the display conventions in place since the 19th century, they would have been sorely disappointed. While in 2020 some artists did experiment with art created from scratch in the virtual world, in 2021 such attempts were abandoned and the institutions returned to their classic exhibitions with a sigh of relief. Not only did we never get to see any experimental online galleries, but quite on the contrary in 2021 two new standard commercial white cubicle-like galleries were opened in Warsaw: Gunia Nowik Gallery and Import Export.
The art market in the second year of the pandemic did manage surprisingly well, with record-breaking growth to show for it. Contemporary painting sales rose 114 % in comparison to last year. Although this year’s exhibition that was part of the Not Fair initiative tried to prove private collectors tend to choose more experimental forms, like video – even some first timid attempts at introducing the blockchain technology of NFTs took place – it is painting that remains the bedrock of the Polish art market. This comes as no surprise as the most interesting phenomena in young Polish art continue to arise in the medium of painting.
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This was another year of strong artistic debuts for painters. Veronika Hapchenko, who graduated this year from the Fine Art Academy in Kraków, explores the surprising links between occult movements and revolutionary politics during the first years of the USSR through her blurry, oneiric paintings bathed in shades of brown and grey. Oneiric is also a good word to characterise the work of Jan Porczyński who debuted this summer with a solo exhibition in Komputer Gallery in Warsaw. His gouaches create flat, theatrical-like worlds full of saturated colours, fauns playing flutes, mysterious creatures illuminated by the sun with sinister faces stretching fiery tentacles across the sky. Another debutante of this year, Monika Falkus from Katowice, displayed her diploma paintings at a solo exhibition in Szara Gallery revealing intimate stories about feelings and carnality that capture a wide spectrum of emotions with efficient means.
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A minute of scream for Belarus, on the left: Jana Shostak, 29.05.2021, photo: Dawid Żuchowicz / Agencja Gazeta
Although the art world returned to its well-worn institutional paths, it did not hide itself in its own little castle completely. The art market is one thing but Polish art did not lose its critical eye as demonstrated by the photographers from the Archive of Public Protests (APP), which expands with every street demonstration. This archive of photojournalists includes works that have become iconic already. It’s no coincidence that in Labirynt Gallery in Lublin, photos by APP’s members were juxtaposed with photographs by Chris Niedenthal, who famously documented everyday life in Poland under Martial Law in the early 1980s. Moreover, APP was nominated for both the Spojrzenia award in Zachęta Gallery (Poland’s equivalent of the UK’s Turner Prize) and Polityka magazine’s Passport awards.
Tytus Szabelski’s work is a more conceptual example of engaged photography. His project AMZN was exhibited twice this year: in Municipal Gallery Arsenał in Poznań and at Biennale Warszawa. It is a critical analysis of the way Jeff Bezos’ corporation works, an entity which has already become a synonym for worker exploitation and other maladies of late capitalism. Szabelski approaches his topic from two different sides by looking at Amazon from the outside and from the inside. While working on AMZN, he joined one of the first Amazon warehouses in Poland as an employee. His experimental photographs and installations render the character of how the corporation functions. Szabelski delivers a kind of technocratic realism that chooses a dehumanised perspective and becomes the eye of the algorithm that manages the warehouse.
Originally written in Polish, translated by KZ, Dec 2021
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