5 Artists to Watch During Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Which Unfolds Against the Backdrop of a General Election

Warsaw Gallery Weekend returns as a general election looms in
Poland.

The country’s ruling right-wing party has been ramping up its
rhetoric against groups it deems a threat to family values, and
artists are in a defiant, but anxious, mood. The shadow cast by the
rise of nationalist populism is reflected in many of the works on
show at the more than 20 galleries taking part across the Polish
capital.

Since 2011, Warsaw galleries have banded together to host a
weekend of coordinated openings based on a successful model
developed in Berlin. The 2019 edition in Poland, which kicks off on
Friday, September 20, is
upping the ante in an attempt to make the city a leading hub in
Central Europe for edgy art. The three-day event will
include an inaugural “summit” aimed at Central and Eastern European
collectors. The Polish capital’s vibrant gallery scene
means there is no shortage of exciting discoveries to be made—a
fact that attracts international curators and a handful of major
collectors.

The many gallery shows also
provide international visitors an opportunity to experience how
artists are responding to Poland’s conservative government.
(In April, Poles held a
“banana” protest outside the National Museum in Warsaw after the
removal of feminist works, including Consumer
Ar by the Polish artist Natalia LL. The museum’s director
is reported to have said the feminist pioneer’s work, which shows
young female models eating bananas and ice cream in a suggestive
way, was too “disturbing” for younger visitors.)

Here are five artists to check
out this weekend in Warsaw.

Kamil Kukla at M2
Gallery

In his tongue-in-cheek
exhibition text, the Krakow-based visual artist and musician Kamil
Kulka (born 1989) describes being overcome by a vision that has
pushed him to paint the series “The Patriotic Gland.” Unable to
muster a warm reaction to the name “Poland”—which would render him
a true patriot—he overcompensated. Just like “the most perverse
sexual fantasies are created in the minds of the impotent,” he
writes, his overactive imagination envisioned an organ inside his
body from which streams of blind love to the homeland would spring.
The oil paintings show entangled intestines and tubes growing
around nationalistic emblems, such as the Axe and Eagle, which was
used to mark non-Jewish shops in Poland in the
1930s. 

Irmina Staś at Le
Guern

The conceptual artist Irmina
Staś (born 1986) is showing figurative watercolors and soft
sculptures in an exhibition titled “Ornaments.” Bodily details, such as a round breast, a
painter finger nail, or a pulled-out tooth, are repeated on her
canvases like a pattern on wallpaper, blurring the lines between
ornamentation and symbolic content. The textile objects meld
fabrics, thread, and insulation materials to create tactile,
corporal forms. The artist’s work conveys the rebellious, feminist
spirit that inspires women to take to the streets to protest
anti-abortion laws, and new legislation aimed at controlling
women’s bodies. 

Zuza Golińska
at Piktogram

This June, the Polish government
was one of four European Union member states to veto an agreement
on carbon neutrality goals. In the coal-dependent country, it is
unlikely that the ruling PiS party will change its environmental
tune. Zuza Golińska’s (born 1990) exhibition “Suns” is a sculptural contemplation of the
future of the planet as an arid, waterless, and sun-baked place.
Strings of linked metal spheres and loops are welded together and
painted a bright yellow to form pieces that seem to sprout out of
toxic soil. Golińska quotes the Polish science-fiction writer
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris in the exhibition text: “We have no need of
other worlds. A single world of our own suffices us, but we can’t
accept it for what it is.” 

Dominika Olszowy
at Raster

The Polish artist Dominika
Olszowy (born 1982) works across a variety of media. She often
bases her work around domestic interiors and the aspirations and
anxieties inherent in them. At Raster, she is creating a
site-specific, stage-like set filled with her leather-furniture
sculptures. Her surreal sculptures shown at the LISTE art fair in
Basel this year, include functional water fountains bubbling out of
leather handbags. The tension between the orgiastic eruptions and
the sense of containment and restraint were poignant metaphors for
the place of women in Polish society. Olszowy is the winner of this
year’s Views award, given by Zachęta National Gallery of Art and
Deutsche Bank to a rising Polish talent.

Joanna Woś at Gallery
Serce Człowieka 

Joanna Woś´s solo exhibition,
“Nectar,” features paintings that grapple with themes
of shame, repression, and sensuality. The works are steeped in
symbolism derived from art history, with Balthus’s paintings
perhaps a key reference point. There is a dualism in the
mysterious, psycho-sexual scenes and hairless figures in her
canvases. Her latest works explore the idea that humans possess two
or more souls: one associated with the body and its functions, the
other free to journey and escape the body. 

Warsaw Gallery
Weekend runs September
20 through September 22, 2019, various venues,
Warsaw. 

The post 5 Artists to Watch During Warsaw Gallery Weekend,
Which Unfolds Against the Backdrop of a General Election
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