Drawing inspiration from the "tradition of metaphorical montage known from interwar painting, photography, and avant-garde cinema", Józef Robakowski used film and photography as a language to undermine the established communist reality of the 1960s. His concept of art is based on the idea of a field of energy transmissions. Many of his works are biological-mechanical recordings, providing commentary on issues such as vitality or energy resulting from the contact with a tool. The film are often an effect of an encounter between the mechanical camera and the human body, a confrontation between man and medium. "I want to tell you all that art is energy", Robakowski says, jumping out of water in his Energy Manifesto (2003), as if paraphrasing (and referring to) a statement made by fellow artist Andrzej Pawłowski, who claimed that "art is an energy field". The artist is represented at Artissima thanks to the Foksal Gallery Foundation.
The Warsaw-based Leto and Piktogram/BLA galleries join to present works of Leszek Knaflewski, who has been stretching visual-art boundaries into the realm of sound since the 1990s. Before his career as an independent artist, Knaflewski was part of the Koło Klipsa group, making work that the curator Anda Rottenberg referred to as "post-painting sculpture". With Koło Klipsa, Knaflewski created multi-part spatial structures gathered in a "whole", a sort of hybrid of reality.
At the time of martial law in the 1980s, artists got together to present joint action in response to the lack of action on the part of institutions, and their negative stance towards the work of artists of the period. The alienation experienced by these artists gave way to a meatier approach to works of art, taking on the role of the gallery, the relation between an object and its viewer (or lack thereof). Art writer Aleksandra Jach says that the political context must be taken into consideration when dealing with the works of Koło Klipsa and Knaflewski's drawings in particular, with their varying degrees of involvement, truth, illusion and discovery. She writes, "The motives that interested Knaflewski do not follow any systems, therefore his works cannot be regarded as 'the traces of the era'. It’s a manifesto of singleness, much sought for nowadays; consent for personal narrative; mythicization of reality that extracts a different potential than the one emphasized by – often oppressive – rationalism". Knaflewski's works from this period are the focus of the Artissima exhibition.
Artissima is one of the relevant reviews of contemporary art in Europe. Polish galleries exhibiting at the 2012 edition include Leto, Le Guern, Piktogram/BLA and the Foksal Gallery Foundation.
For more information, see: www.artissima.it
Editor: Agnieszka Le Nart
Source: Artissima 19, Leto Gallery, Le Guern, Foksal Foundation Gallery