A mineral with use spanning millennia, salt today remains mostly hidden in kitchen cupboards, its once-precious rarity long forgotten in favour of widespread use beyond human consumption. Before being sealed into supermarket packets, it was mined and harvested across vast distances as a substance dense with value, capable of sustaining life by arresting its breakdown. Although seemingly more ordinary, it continues to embody an unusual duality: it preserves, yet it can sterilise soil, corrode materials, or render land utterly uninhabitable. Historically a vital commodity, traded, taxed, and fought over, it became entangled with systems of extraction within colonial economies. As a force that’s both preservative and corrosive, salt carries material memory of survival and devastation alike.  

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘴𝘢𝘭𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘳𝘶𝘪𝘯𝘴 takes this paradox as its point of departure, using salt’s capacity to both preserve and to erode as a lens through which to reflect on legacy-making and the fragile conditions under which histories persist at a time increasingly defined by impermanence. Marked by political conflicts, ecological degradation, and shifting geopolitical certainties, the question of how one will be remembered feels at once urgent and faintly futile. The artists in this exhibition take up precisely this gesture, assembling various fragments (personal, inherited, political) into a provisional constellation of meanings. They work with and against the archive, animating what would otherwise remain inert, turning towards both the intimate, vastly different pasts and the futures that have not yet taken form. In their hands, legacy becomes something more fluid and negotiable: less an inheritance to be safeguarded than a set of questions to untangle. 

Curated by Ania Kaczynska

Photography by AURA Studio

Holidays begin with an image. For some the sea — its color, its sound, the water enveloping the body. For others, it is a path disappearing into a dense forest, a place off the map and beyond mobile phone range. It can also be a vision of intense exhaustion: overtraining in grueling mountain runs, crossing successive passes by bicycle. Holidays are a time of festivals, musical rapture, a throat made raw from singing together. Others still choose wandering: long hours of walking, a landscape slowly changing around each bend in the path, the repetition of steps that brings order to one’s thoughts.

Holidays as a constellation of different imaginaries. Above all, they are about freedom — how to momentarily change the pace of life, to regain contact with oneself, with family, with friends. They evoke an idyllic, tranquil world, full of justice, wise decisions, and simple solutions. They speak of love and friendship — always sincere, always faithful, and forever lasting.

We want to present this record of desires, these holiday projections. Through our projection of summer, through our scenarios for the coming months, what emerges is precisely what is most lacking in everyday life.

How to Avoid Being Wrapped unfolds as a poetic reflection on what happens when artworks are stored, wrapped, protected, and concealed. It is within the apparent banality of bubble wrap that objects become suspended between presence and absence, visibility and projection. Like a Schrödinger’s cat of the art world, the show invites us to question what we trust when we cannot fully see: how value is constructed, how meaning is mediated, and what remains when the object itself disappears from view.

Adriana Jaroslavsky is a London-based sculptor and installation artist. Her practice works through materials in tension, forms that breathe, resist, yield, or float, moving between structure and softness, logic and dream. Moving between sculpture, drawing, and performance, Ana María Chamucero approaches household, found, and organic materials as partners in a shared choreography. Rooted in her background as a former dancer and in Colombian daily practices, her work is grounded in rehearsal: an ongoing shared dance, or pas de deux, in the studio where objects gradually reveal their own behaviour. Loulou Siem’s research-driven practice spans sculpture, textile, video, and painting, exploring the boundary between value and function. She considers the act of recording—through casting, weaving, or image-making—not simply as preservation, but as a way to question the object’s authority. Nuria López Blanco works between image, sculpture, and installation, thinking through what might be understood as the place or scene of the photograph. Her installations tend to work like film sets, where objects are almost props: they don’t quite do what is expected of them.

~

When I wrap an object in lots of bubble wrap, there comes a point when I can no longer perceive what I want to protect. Very often, when this happens, I wonder whether the object is still actually contained within that inner space—no longer visible—or whether, on the contrary, it has disappeared; whether it was never there, or whether I have ended up wrapping something else in its place.

Wrapping something means introducing it into another temporality. In a way, it is isolating it from certain conditions: like when we place an object in a display case or a drawing in a frame. However, when an object is wrapped, something even more interesting happens. In many cases, we stop perceiving the object itself and begin to operate on the basis of substitutions: signs, words, images, labels, or photographs that remind us—or promise us—what is supposedly contained within.

Loulou showed me a series of images taken at the V&A East Storehouse. Among them, my attention was drawn to a costume covered in a white wrapping, carefully tailored to its shape. Attached to the outside was a photograph showing what was supposed to be inside. To a certain extent, the wrapping made me imagine what the costume might look like, whether it was there or not. But, above all, it showed that the costume was important enough to be present, even if I could only guess at its appearance. Besides containing or ‘capturing’ the object, the wrapping also conveys value, mediates, presents and exhibits it.

In How to Avoid Being Wrapped, a series of images, objects, and projections can be glimpsed between wrappings, boxes, papers, sewing patterns and maintenance materials. Some of these now contain nothing but air and, in that emptiness, have been transformed into something else.

𝘵𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘣𝘺 𝘕𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘢 𝘓ó𝘱𝘦𝘻 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘰

There Is No Way To Get the Hell Out of Here is a group exhibition offering a critical reflection on the contemporary political and technological climate, as well as on a question that increasingly permeates everyday life: what kind of future is currently being constructed, and who will be able to inhabit it? In the context of accelerated technological development, deepening social inequalities, and ongoing political and ecological crises, narratives of progress increasingly take the form of promises detached from responsibility.

The exhibition presents new sculptural works by Mikołaj Sobotka, which engage with visions of technological apocalypse; a series of printed flags by the American artist Phil America, depicting technological devices used within the oppressive prison system of the United States; paintings by Iza Opiełka, whose formal language derives from rendered visual codes characteristic of social media platforms; as well as an installation and a video essay by the artist duo Xtreme Girl (Lena Peplińska and Laura Radzewicz).

Each of the invited artists addresses, in their own way, the anxiety surrounding technology—an anxiety rooted in the industrial era and intensified by contemporary digital capitalism. Technology is not presented as a neutral infrastructure, but as a belief system saturated with promises of transcendence, control, and perpetual growth. Rather than proposing solutions, There Is No Way To Get the Hell Out of Here confronts viewers with the psychological, symbolic, and ideological structures that sustain contemporary faith in technology, raising questions about its mythological consequences and the cost of this belief—paid above all by marginalized communities.

Curated by Martyna Stopyra

The tension between intention and interpretation builds a unique relationship between the creator and the viewer, but it can also become a kind of barrier that disrupts the freedom of communication. The exhibition I Will Reveal Myself Through My Gaze is an attempt to shorten this distance — an invitation to an encounter in which the artist and the viewer stand face to face in the honesty of a shared look.

In this exhibition, Zuza Dolega, Anna Myszkowiak, Kamila Kamińska, and Łukasz Stokłosa engage in a dialogic constellation that explores the issue of the author’s presence within the work. Dolega burns words into paper, turning fire into a language of emotions. Myszkowiak lends material a tenderness and the weight of corporeality. Kamińska paints “cutaneous landscapes” — images that breathe and pulse with life. Stokłosa looks into the past, finding within it a reflection of contemporary sensitivity.

It is a story about authenticity and exposure — about art that does not hide behind form but reveals the human being, their emotions, memory, and gaze. The exhibition encourages the viewer to look into the artist’s eyes — and perhaps to catch a glimpse of themselves there.

My heart is an old museum
and the museum guard with his girded belly would never know you tore up the morning streets with cries the size of kitchen knives, once, before silently rearranging the room to make sure it left no gaps where your furniture had been removed. It was done to perfection; only the books looked a little crestfallen where their twin editions were abducted. There you are, idling in the corner of reason when I turn a folding screen and approach you and see how carelessly you let your breath gather up on the glass, in luminous, feathered circles. Your turn seems unusually well-timed when I sidle up to you with hopes of planting a small kiss on your brushed cheek (you were always master of the artful dodge). All this was bracketed by the shrill call-and-response of whistles at the train platform where you finally left me; one pair of prosthetic voice boxes assuring each other, in all the ways we could not.
  The grammar of time is emergent. Friends said things to the effect of ‘time will tell’, and other phrases with a misplaced sense of ominous knowing. Only my indefatigable refrain could force them to resort to this; I know that when I am sad I have no resolve and indulge my obsessions with ‘what went wrong’ and who-did-what and time runs on with the continuity Bergsonian duration, which I’ve no wherewithal to explain, being hopelessly sleep deprived, and it was months of exhausted clichés before the same friends garnered sufficient courage to ask, very tentatively, ‘are you over her yet’. I am but a semaphore wanting for naught. You can lose the sole of your shoe just as easily on your way to a wedding, it seems, so here I am: trying to forget that that’s exactly where I’d clumsily revealed I’d been reading everything I could find about you online.
  Today I find you in the Southeast Asian quad of the museum, and your gaze is arrested by a moulting piece hailing from Vietnam. It is produced by a technique I dare not pronounce (sơn ta, the plaque reads) and you speak of it as a ‘process of inversion, that nevertheless produces a palimpsest’. I wish to say something about Marker’s Statues Also Die but think only of your breath in my mouth. Astride the beam of your thought (now a rumination on the methods of the ancients in relation to time and proportion involving jute string and nails), forget it, it no longer matters. It’s kind of embryonic in here; there is no movement but our stirrings, only depth and hollows and the most of gorgeous eyebags which I have always worshipped. Our interaction is conditioned by impossibility so instead I train my focus on avoiding ill-fated attempts at inordinately complex words that just wind up entangling me in awkward syntactical constructions. Of course, these are the formulations that adoring you were made up of, and nothing makes me feel safer than recourse to formula.
  I am the happiest simply being entrusted with your museum locker key, and every so often I finger it lovingly in my pocket. Certain rooms of the museum harbour a stillness that hardens or gapes, others draw spider threads from where I stand to all the dark corners of the room. (The girded belly lumbers behind us, cheesily scratching itself.) If I take the time to overthink this, we are our very own examples of indexing and ruin, for which museum conservation provides too perfect an analogy. A structure is made to surrender itself to representation, before duly being destroyed. (To shore up against our years is unforgivably hard to do in your presence.) When I call you by your private nickname, I sound like a progressively degenerating feedback loop that tarnishes itself as it haplessly stutters on, but still, it conjures that weather-worn image of us delightedly discovering Basinski. You are not playing my game though, and so I find myself pleading with my reflection in the face of an old, Czech clock. Is imperfection the only reliable feature of anything; the very style of substance?
  Among these objects of conquest (which we agree need repatriating, as an aside), your iciness finally thaws and the between the fading summits of your peaks dawns the senselessness of loss. Bourgeois restraint forbids our tear from leaving your duct so you quip the much-quipped ‘unprecedented for our times’, as if you were one of Brecht’s newspaper fragments swept up in the maelstrom of a collage. I am just another museum donation of an uncertain make, age and pedigree, falling into a plume of obscurity, your box titled ‘miscellaneous’. The silence of the museum is deafening, like heaven, or second to. Except nothing is forever; your ringtone is a 1990s lyric that reaches out into the stretches of an adjacent hallway and beyond it, to where you wander. Interrupting us is your mildly irritating best friend, a curator, who strictly refers to himself as an ‘organiser’ in all public communication. Outside the pigeons absent-mindedly pattern the sidewalk within the fold of the season; even they know love that little bit better.

Elaine ML Tam

Anna Czarnota is a painter born in 2000. In 2025, she completed her integrated Master’s degree at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Zofia Weiss Gallery in Kraków, the Napiórkowska Gallery in Warsaw, and the Zbrojownia Gallery in Gdańsk, where she was one of the finalists of the Wojciech Fangor Student Painting Competition. There, she received an honorable mention from both the Mazovian Center for Contemporary Art “Elektrownia” and Krupa Gallery. In January 2025, she opened a solo exhibition at Elektrownia in Radom.

In her work, figures are often accompanied by additional elements such as heads or other external manifestations of what the portrayed individuals carry within. Heads, dogs, or transformations of the surrounding environment all serve the same purpose — to externally express, in a painterly way, emotions and internal states.

___

It’s three in the morning.

One o’clock at night, two o’clock at night, but three in the morning.

It is a symbolic hour in two ways. It is often called the “witching hour” or the “devil’s hour”: in neo-pagan beliefs, it is the moment when the boundary between the known and the unknown, the normal and the paranormal, becomes blurred.

For people suffering from insomnia, the same hour means something entirely different: a moment when we stop deceiving ourselves. The excuse of “I’m just going to bed late” gives way to sudden honesty with oneself. It is the time when day and night merge, and the awareness of the impossibility of sleep becomes clear. And then we stop lying to ourselves.

The title of the exhibition refers to this moment of honesty with oneself, not only in the context of insomnia, but also of the various thoughts that tangle in our heads during the day and in this moment of silence and calm, under the cover of night, resound loudly and forcefully, like the whimpering of a dog.

Just as three in the morning is a symbolic moment of change, so too was the year 2020, which was supposed to inaugurate a new decade with great celebration, but instead became a turning point, dividing contemporary history into what came before the pandemic and what came after.

One of the most radical changes was how we perceive the bed.

“The bed is for sleeping”, teenagers around the world had heard this for decades. It was not a place for eating or doing homework; it was supposed to serve the function of a place to rest. The pandemic, relocating all life into isolated spaces where we spent weeks on end, particularly altered the function of the bed. It became, especially for those finishing high school or studying at the time, the center of the entire world. It was a place of sleep and rest, of work, classes, and online meetings with friends, but above all, it was a safe space from which one could observe the world without letting it enter this sacral sphere.

Bed rotting became a form of self-care, but at the same time, a source of many problems: self-isolation and sleep disorders.

Anna Czarnota addresses in her practice themes of honesty with oneself, the thoughts that haunt us, and the meaning of rest in the 21st century, in the context of the constant bombardment of stimulating information (doomscrolling) and the blurring of the boundary between work and home.

Doomscrolling and bed rotting, two inseparable phenomena, are interesting not only from an etymological perspective, evoking grotesque visions of the end of the world and decomposition, but also from the perspective of the traditional symbolism of the bed in art, especially when, as in Anna’s work, they depict women in beds and in positions of rest.

A man in a bed was usually shown as bedridden, wounded, or dying, whereas a woman in bed was meant to symbolize eroticism and submission.

Fortunately, both times and art have changed, and with them also the symbolism of the bed. In Anna’s works, the bed, the sofa, and the poses of the figures speak about what rest and a sense of safety look like in the seeming calm of one’s own home, apartment, or bedroom. They also directly relate to the profession of the artist, which, like many independent professions, is a 24/7 job, always occupying a significant part of one’s thoughts regardless of place or time.

Physical rest contrasts with the lack of intellectual rest. Days when we feel tired but at the same time unsatisfied with the work we’ve done loop endlessly. The fragile boundary between relaxation and overwork, between calm and overstimulation, becomes tangled. And so, again, it is three in the morning.

The works of the three artists – Marko Obradović, Patryk Staruch, and Łukasz Stokłosa – explore the role and subjectivity of the gaze, themes of alienation, the role of the observer and the observed, and the influence of pop culture on collective consciousness. It is a narrative without a clear beginning or end, leaving the viewer suspended between what is real and what is merely seen. It is a landscape shaped by fleeting impressions and emotional afterimages, where what is observed is always slipping away, and what remains is only a trace, a projection.

The works of Obradović, Staruch, and Stokłosa navigate these in-between worlds with distinct yet resonant approaches. Obradović’s practice, infused with themes of abjection, transhumanism, and esotericism, creates speculative narratives that examine the ephemeral nature of identity and spirituality. His pieces suggest feelings of melancholy and claustrophobia, hinting at spaces both intimate and inaccessible, offering the viewer a glimpse into realities that are deliberately obscured. Patryk Staruch delves into the psychoanalytical undercurrents of cinema. Reimagining memories and dreams through cinematic language, his paintings question the power dynamics of the gaze and the fragile construction of self-image. Staruch’s canvases operate as disconnected yet strangely coherent frames of a never-made film, populated by dreamers, watchers, and the dreamt. Łukasz Stokłosa’s work reflects on the aestheticized ghosts of late capitalist fantasy. His fragmentary, glitch-like images evoke the faded opulence of the 1990s, exploring how collective desires, visual culture, and memory shape — and ultimately haunt — our perception of self and other. His figures hover between presence and absence, between acting and simply existing, becoming mirrors of a world both hyperreal and spectral.

The exhibition loosely resonates with the psychological atmosphere of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, as well as the existential rebellion of the French New Wave. It examines alienation as a social reaction to an unstable reality, using dichotomies — life and death, reality and illusion, consciousness and unconsciousness — to unsettle our certainties. Rather than offering a linear narrative or a closed interpretation, exhibition invites viewers into a liminal zone: a space where reality is perpetually questioned, where memory merges with projection, and where the self becomes as fleeting and unfixed as the images that pass before our eyes and subconscious.

Roughly two years before the iPhone came out. Five years before Instagram launched, and twenty years as I write this text. Harrow, March 31^st 2005… refers to the date that Kodak ceased production of photographic film in the UK. At its peak, the Harrow factory employed over 6,000 employees, eventually closing in 2016. In conjuring this moment, the exhibition title frames a defining shift from analogue to digital. In this time, photography has become increasingly computational, fugitive and networked. In convening these artists, the exhibition asks: what is lost in the rush towards a visual environment that emphasises immediacy, convenience, and abundance? In looking slowly, what and how might we see differently?

Harrow, March 31^st 2005… reflects on archives and photography. Some works adopt archival and photographic approaches; others are more material and embodied. The diaristic title suggests an intimate and everyday encounter, with artworks on a scale close to the human body.  Artists weave, paint, carve, cut, collage, cast, pleat and print, imbuing their work with artistic conversations and familial anecdotes. Partially abstract but never fully, subjects and narratives are inferred.

From intervening in the family album, casting familiar childhood items, to tangentially evoking artistic antecedents and friendship, artworks embrace personal cosmologies and transform incidental iconographies. The artists in the exhibition understand that looking is an embodied, citational, and unreliable act. Seeing is material and social, refracted by memory and freighted by experience.

Text: George Vasey

4 artists
4 diploma presentations selected from the open call

After leaving academic institutions, young artists are confronted with the challenge of finding a suitable space to present their graduation projects to a wider audience. They also often face uncertainty, not only about where to present their work, but also how to navigate the unstructured and often precarious art world. To address their needs, and highlight these concerns, we are pleased to announce that this year KRUPA gallery is showcasing four diploma projects by Zofia Lompe (Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw), Magdalena Ferdyn (Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Katowice), and Andrzej Stanek and Lidia Tańska (University of the Arts in Poznań).

The exhibition series LAST SUMMER responds to this moment — the in-between time after graduation and before what comes next. Though varied in form and focus, their works resonate with common concerns: memory, identity, ecological grief, social exclusion, and the unease surrounding personal and planetary transformation. LAST SUMMER refers to what is often called “the longest summer” — the liminal moment between student life and adulthood. For these artists, it becomes a metaphor for broader questions: What now? How do we move forward in a world facing crisis, collapse, and redefinition? Their works address the soil and the body, history and repetition, invisible labour, and deeply personal states of loss, confusion, and hope. 

Across these works, we see a reckoning with change, both intimate and global. The artists explore memory, repetition, roots, and rupture, questioning what it means to begin anew — as artists, citizens, and bodies in a world on edge. Whether through ritual, speculation, or resistance, they reflect a generation’s attempt to reclaim agency, voice, and a sense of ground in uncertain times. 

programme curator: Natalia Barczynska

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” With this sentence, H.P. Lovecraft opens The Call of Cthulhu—arguably his most iconic and mythologized short story. The rhetorical move here sets the stage for a worldview in which what is human is but a marginal sliver of a far greater whole. 

To construct this perspective, Lovecraft draws on the concept of the aeon—a geochronological unit encompassing eras that span hundreds of millions of years. Yet in his writing, the term transcends the spatiotemporal: it carries an existential charge. Aeons—those endless eternities—become something primordial, pre-human, and utterly incomprehensible. They operate on a scale that crushes our capacity for understanding and are wielded as instruments of cosmic horror—a horror that arises from revealing humanity’s insignificance in the face of vast, eternal forces. Lovecraft speaks of the aeon as a gulf of unimaginable archaic history, of ancient and godless cycles of life in which the world and our conceptions have no part. Elsewhere, he adds that within these temporal abysses, the human world seems but a transient and ephemeral episode. 

But these aeonic depths do not refer solely to the past—they may just as well belong to the future. What defines them is a continuity of being, in which the human is neither center nor measure, but something nearly accidental. 

This mode of thought is echoed in the work of Justyna and Paweł Baśnik, as well as the artistic duo Inside Job (Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus). In their practices, human scale is contrasted with alternate temporalities—deep durations belonging to other life forms co-inhabiting the Earth. The images and objects they create seem to emerge from aeonic abysses, from suspended time zones we can neither map nor name. While the Baśniks’ works evoke a world before humans, Inside Job conjures visions of what might follow humanity’s end. Despite distinct aesthetic languages, their works form a continuum—one that feels grown from a single evolutionary process. 

The paintings and objects by Justyna and Paweł Baśnik draw from the visual language of ancient imagery, but they carry meanings that extend beyond the human realm. Many of Justyna’s works center around plants—both contemporary species and their archetypal ancestors. In Larix decidua (from the Solastalgia series), she portrays the silver birch, a tree native to temperate zones and now threatened with extinction due to global warming. The series title references a term for the homesickness caused by environmental loss—the longing for a natural world eroded by human impact. 

In her latest work, the artist reinterprets the medieval altarpiece. In place of the Tree of Knowledge, we find the titular Tree of Life—a motif rooted in pre-Christian mythologies, including those of Mesopotamia. It symbolizes the constant regeneration of nature and the transience of human life. In another variant, it becomes the Cosmic Tree—bridging the underworld, Earth, and the cosmos. The aeonic dimension is also present in Tabernaculum, where, in place of the eucharist, the central relic is a prehistoric fossil: the shell of a cephalopod from one hundred million years ago. 

Inside Job’s Will Spread series of metal assemblages likewise engages with the longevity and adaptive capacities of plants. At its center is the silhouette of a thistle—a ruderal plant often found in human-disturbed areas—reworked through forms inspired by the Voynich manuscript. This mysterious document, filled with as-yet-unidentified flora, entwines botanical illustration with alchemy and astrology. 

Their Antiya series introduces futuristic visions of hybrid entities growing amidst the ruins of civilization. Floral sculptures made from recycled leather and synthetic textiles sprawl across metal frameworks, resembling aquatic lilies. Though they rest upon industrial remnants, they assert dominance over them. Yet these forms are not purely botanical—they fuse biological and technological orders. Ula and Michał continually subject their forms to mutation, transforming earlier objects into new ones, crafting a fluid narrative in which nothing remains fixed. Their material choices also underscore this hybridity—as in Untitled (Resting Spores), where textile screens made from linen and cotton (plant-based in origin) are machine-woven and then hand-finished. The result: composite systems where natural, technological, and human cycles intersect. 

The aeonic emerges, too, in Paweł Baśnik’s painting. Earth resembles a geological record of transformation. The earthy pigment palette evokes timeless processes—rock stratification, erosion, tectonic pressure. The non-figurative composition unfolds through gravity-driven flows of paint and solvents. Pigments settle, accumulate, and give rise to organic formations—governed entirely by forces beyond human control. 

An image emerges from a similar process In His House at R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming—a direct reference to Lovecraft’s mythos. The canvas features an anthropomorphic statue caught mid-transformation. Blurred contours and fluid stains give it a dynamic, almost pulsating quality—as if the form were in slow motion, in a state of perpetual mutation. The shapes are irregular, organic, as if emerging from matter itself, forming an alien, unknowable geometry. It is the call of something that, as the artist notes, should neither be heard nor granted visible form. 

The practices of Justyna and Paweł Baśnik and Inside Job embody a way of thinking that displaces humanity from the center of the world. Time here does not run linearly, nor does it move toward any fulfillment—it stratifies, swells, mutates. Like pigment on canvas or hybrid forms rising from raw matter. Aeonic duration becomes a mode of seeing—a gaze in which humankind does not vanish, but becomes part of larger processes. 

These works do not offer easy answers, set boundaries, or provide consolation. They are like traces of something that once was—or of what we have not yet learned to recognize—survivals or omens. In this suspension of form, meaning, and temporality, a new language for narrating the world may be taking root. 

Text: Joanna Kobyłt 

Works presented by Justyna Baśnik and Paweł Baśnik were created as part of the Artistic Scholarship awarded by the Mayor of Wrocław.

The burden of affirmation unfolds as a layered narrative, where the boundaries between the living and the artificial are blurred. This story explores intimacy, corporeality, and the tension between organic materials and man-made constructs. Anna Maria Zuzela’s works delve into themes of resilience and fragility through tactile forms. The artist addresses the themes of the body with remarkable sensitivity in response to contemporary dilemmas and the oppression faced by bodies—especially those culturally alienated and stigmatized.

The layered lines simulate the sensation of skin, a surface that absorbs, resists, and transforms. Zuzela often combines performative approaches with her artistic process, using materials such as ceramics, metal, or textiles to push the boundaries between the organic and the industrial, the ephemeral and the enduring, the human and the non-human.

This interweaving of forms proposes attentiveness in traversing the terrain of desire, vulnerability, and transformation, and an alternative view of time in which past and present collapse into a single, shifting narrative. Through Zuzela’s paintings and sculptural installations, the artist seeks to explore themes of materiality and transformation, using both controlled craftsmanship and the unpredictable nature of manual techniques to create a dynamic, tactile installation that bridges the organic and the industrial. These works pose critical questions about the nature of intimacy and the ways in which bodies, objects, and images occupy space and memory.

The exhibition spread across two locations, as a symbolic portal simultaneously separates and connects two spaces – KRUPA gallery in Wrocław, Poland and its newly opened venue in London – marking both the conclusion of one chapter and the beginning of another,  for Radek Brousil as well as for the gallery. In his latest series of works, Radek Brousil, returns to painting while simultaneously remaining faithful to his photographic past. By referring to chronopolitics (the politics of time) and selecting images from his own archives, the artist reflects on photography itself and the connection between conceptualism and the image, between the conscious and unconscious mind.

In this series, there are 25 large paintings (12 works in London, 13 in Wrocław)—one more than the usual 24 hours on a clock (in contrast to the 12-hour US time format)—which form a complete whole. Each element of the black oil paintings on jute is a carefully chosen reference to politics or personal and collective memory. These works also question the memory of the material and medium of photography. The artist creates a unique connection between oil underpainting and image transfers, including details of clock hands sourced mainly from the facades of churches. Each painting features a photographic transfer in a different position, freely referring to the rhythm of counterclockwise movement. Dark, empty, and raw, surfaces allude to the theory of black holes—a symbolic beginning and, at the same time, infinity—as well as the idea of invisibility. Some photographic transfers are more precise, revealing structures or specific clockwork elements, while others take on a more abstract and organic direction. In the London exhibition, the series is also accompanied by works in a detailed format with global underpainting and photo transfers where the entire surface of smaller canvases becomes a dialogue between the painting and photographic layers, leaving no empty space.

Made from old furniture, the site specific installation in Wroclaw and sculptures made from table legs in London create a bridge between these two exhibitions. In a world where manual and craft-based labor performed by humans is increasingly undervalued by society, and intellectual work is worshiped, free time and time spent at work are becoming ever more controlled—whether by ourselves or by large corporations. Productivity, efficiency, and the cult of intellectual labor, driven by the pursuit of higher social status, take precedence. Priceless, timeworn tabletops from historic and socialist-era (PRL) tables, bearing traces of work tools, provide an essential backdrop for a critical reflection on contemporary capitalist time constructs. The legs of one of the oldest objects served the artist as semi-organic forms functioning as stands for church candles. The candle clock, an ancient invention, was one of the early attempts made by man at measuring time. Transformed into a more precise tool, it was embedded with heavy nails, marking time like a timer. As the candle burned down to a set point, the falling nail would signal the end of a specific interval.

While working on the project, Radek took part in several residencies, including Residency Unlimited and ISCP in New York. It was there that he developed some elements of his new works – including detailed photo shoots of damaged, often bizarre or completely non-functioning clocks. Those that Brousil particularly observed were mainly in public spaces – on the clock towers of churches, synagogues, city halls and other symbols of political power. The photographs of clocks later became a starting point for his work on canvas, tools to tell the story of our relationship with the rules of time. Once functional in the city for practical purposes, these clocks today serve more as vestiges of history and decorative elements of old architecture, often being restored anew. The stark contrast between the dizzying pace of life in New York and the almost monastic focus he experienced at the Egon Schiele Art Center in the Czech town of Krumlov had a profound impact on his creative process. As he himself puts it, in Krumlov, he worked like a monk – immersed in a meditative rhythm, gradually uncovering what he truly wanted to express in his paintings. It was there that the foundation was laid for the exhibition spread across two spaces. The featured works are more than just the outcomes of artistic experiments; their process, stages, and movement between different places have become integral to this narrative. Unfolding over time, these two exhibitions move toward ideas with both political, systemic and spiritual dimensions.

Referring to the deconstruction of time, Brousil’s photographic transfers—poetic archives of the subconscious—fuse with the conscious narrative of images that follow a counter clockwise direction. Through subtly employed symbols of fallen regimes, the project brings us closer to fleeting occurrences and reflections on the consequences of human behavior, such as hidden racism, escapism, or the pressure to conform to the universal cycles of life in a patriarchal society. Jute bags for preserving, ropes and clocks for measuring, and architectural elements for subconsciously tracking traces of human history and power.

                                                         
                                                                                                                                                                                            text: Natalia Barczyńska

***

Radek Brousil is a Czech artist based in Prague. He works with textiles, alongside ceramics, film, photography and video. His themes address social testimony, presenting an activist expression on an uncertain future. Brousil defines social, cultural and environmental problems using unexpected interpretations and terminology, and chooses rather to look at these issues on a symbolic, personal and emotional level.

OPEN CALL: Diploma Exhibition at KRUPA Gallery

As part of our annual tradition, KRUPA GALLERY Wrocław showcases selected diploma exhibitions by graduates of Fine Arts academies in Poland. We recognize that after leaving academic institutions, many artists face challenges in finding the right space to present their diploma projects to a wider audience. We also understand the significance of this moment as a formal entry into an independent artistic path. Our goal is to support emerging artists by providing an exhibition space and partial organizational assistance for their solo projects.

We are delighted to announce the next edition of this initiative, inviting graduates completing their studies this year. While past editions primarily featured graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, we now welcome submissions from graduates of any Polish art institution at the master’s or doctoral level, across all visual arts disciplines.

In previous years, we had the pleasure of presenting the work of Paweł Baśnik, Monika Polak, Aleksander Baszyński, Zuzanna Janosz, and Kacper Wiatrak. This year, we are opening the call for submissions and will select at least one candidate.

Submission deadline: 31 March, 2025
Announcement of results: 07 April, 2025
Applications should be sent to: kontakt@krupagallery.pl
Email subject: “Diploma Exhibition + Your Full Name”

Requirements:

• A PDF portfolio including your CV.
• A separate PDF detailing your diploma project, including sketches, images of existing works, and a project description.

The exhibition will take place between July and August 2025 and will run for 2–3 weeks at KRUPA GALLERY in Wrocław, Poland. Exact dates will be agreed upon with the selected candidate.

We look forward to your submissions! 

“The Ark” exhibition marks the debut of Krupa Gallery in London.

Presented in Krupa Gallery’s new London space, formerly home to the historic Pakenham Arms pub, THE ARK exhibition draws inspiration from the rich history of the venue. For over a century, it has been a hub of gatherings, celebrations, and cultural exchange—a landmark where locals and travelers alike came together. Now reimagined as a gallery, the space becomes a catalyst for exploring questions of community and the human kind. 

Expanding its territorial reach, Krupa Gallery’s 2025 programme will foster dialogue between its two locations. Functioning like a spatio-temporal portal, the gallery’s activities in Wrocław and London will intertwine, often engaging with the unique context of each site. With a quarter of the 21st century behind us, we enter an era shaped by both retrospection and nostalgia, as well as new beginnings. This duality resonates in the work of the artists we have invited to collaborate with us this year – they explore themes of time, shifting corporeality, and the impact of human activity on both a global and individual scale.

An exhibition embodying a new beginning, THE ARK symbolically inaugurates this space, much like the ceremonial launching of a ship. The title itself evokes images of transition: entrances, passageways, and portals. The featured works recall the ethos of the pub as a place of community, becoming a symbolic waypoint on an ongoing journey towards relationships, self-discovery, evolving values, and questioning the nature of humanity. The artists confront the viewer with contrasts between the primordial and the industrial, the human and the mythical, constructing hybrid entities and a world in which humanity, as we conceive it today, is no longer the dominant force. The exhibition creates a space for multidimensional reflection on the fluidity of genders, bodies, relationships, places, and moments – where life paths and interspecies connections intertwine and overlap, dissolving the boundaries of space-time and territory.

THE ARK challenges human exceptionalism, proposing a reality where humans and non-humans co-exist without hierarchy. It deconstructs human dominance and strips away our privileged position as rulers of the planet to envision a world in which alternative existences take precedence. The further one descends into the exhibition space, the more human influence dissolves, giving way to new ontologies.

The exhibition blends object-oriented ontologies, queer and interspecies bodies, and the natural world within a technological framework. THE ARK becomes a vessel without a captain, navigating a post-human world where survival belongs not to those who dominate, but to those who adapt and transform.The ultimate question remains: In this utopian future, if Homo sapiens endures, will they learn from animals rather than exploiting them for their own use?

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Pola Dwurnik (b. 1979) is one of the most distinctive Polish visual artist of her generation. She works primarily in oil painting, drawing, and collage. She is also an accomplished author and editor.

Dwurnik explores identity as it navigates the tension between internal emotions and external image, pushing the expressive boundaries of figurative representation. One of her central themes is the relationship between humans and animals, a motif she has explored over the years with a mix of fascination and almost obsessive intensity. Her work weaves together various cultural references, literature, and art history, creating a unique visual language that resonates with the aesthetic of decorative tapestries.

Dwurnik’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at numerous institutions, including the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the Center for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, HAU2 in Berlin, Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel, MAXXI National Museum of 21^st Century Art in Rome, Galeria Bielska in Bielsko-Biała, and Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin.

Her works are held in prestigious collections, including the National Museum in Gdańsk, the Museum of Warsaw, MOCAK in Krakow, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, and private collections worldwide. They have also appeared in numerous publications, including the covers of Ocalenie (Salvage) by Czesław Miłosz (Znak Publishing House, 2024) and Paradise Lost by John Milton (Silesian Library, 2024). In 2022, the National Museum in Warsaw, in collaboration with Krupa Gallery, published a comic book adaptation of Witkacy’s final novel Jedyne Wyjście (The Only Exit), illustrated by Dwurnik.

Dwurnik is well-known for her painting series and the publication Girl on Canvas, featuring texts by Olga Tokarczuk, Maria Poprzęcka, and Andrzej Depko, among others. Another notable series, Apolonia’s Garden, was showcased at MOCAK in Krakow in 2012. In Warsaw, her monumental eight-meter wall painting graces the foyer of the Norblin Factory.

After many years in Berlin, where she collaborated with galleries in Laden and Basel, Dwurnik is currently represented by Krupa Gallery (Wrocław) and Harkawik Gallery (New York, Los Angeles). She now resides and works in Warsaw.

It is estimated that digital methods of storing data on external drives or in virtual clouds will allow it to be safely archived for a few decades at most. There are many factors that threaten data permanence, and yet few alternatives are available, which means that as technology users we become slaves to our own devices and their capacity. We almost believe that by expanding the cloud we are expanding the capacity of our personal memory. Today, human memory is stored, represented and communicated through various media. It is no longer just the subjective experience of an individual, but also a reflection affected by external factors such as technology, literature, art or digital media. Memories are becoming inextricably linked to the media used to archive and communicate them. As sensory memory is increasingly integrated with virtual memory, the human relationship with technology becomes more and more complex, not least due to its significant influence on how we remember and share our impressions. The featured works address all of these problems, posing questions about their impact on our everyday functioning, seeking sustainable ways of archiving data and exploring the relationship between how devices work and how we remember. As the world accelerates due to the increasing speed of computers and their computing power, the space on our hard drives seems to be shrinking.

In our search for the most permanent methods of storing contents, ones that will last not just years but millennia, we may think of both incredibly simple solutions, such as carving information into stone (as did the ancient Mesopotamians, Egyptians or Greeks), and cutting-edge approaches, such as quartz crystals (5D storage). Other ideas involve time capsules, e.g. the Arctic World Archive on Spitsbergen in Norway, or solutions based on what we have in our bodies – our DNA records. Some of these are addressed by the featured artists, who question the changing approaches to recording and storing one’s private memories. Iza Opiełka in her most recent works encodes the patterns and pitfalls of doom scrolling, which blends colourful ads, the latest news on the economic and political situation, and deep fakes into a stimulating pulp. The artist is particularly interested in the phenomenon of memory distortion by algorithmic processes, especially in social networks. Mariusz Maślanka‘s Sleepwalking sculptures, on the other hand, were inspired by a sleep monitoring app that enables observations of conscious and unconscious memory, thus linking technology and body. By taking photographs of his own footprints in the snow, the artist composed a permanent, rhythmic sequence of steps used to recreate fleeting traces in a physical form, triggering associations with the shape of a sound wave, an activity graph or a data chart.

When talking about ways of preserving memory, we mustn’t ignore the importance of the spiritual side – the idea of inheriting and passing on not only information and knowledge, but also traditions, symbols and customs. In an attempt to capture and “immortalise” the presence of our deceased ancestors, we use platforms such as Deep Nostalgia AI, which is capable of “reviving” old photographs by generating realistic videos. Digital forms of remembrance are increasingly replacing analogue ones, although the latter are still the most common, accompanying us in our daily lives in various forms, for example as rings passed down from one generation to another. Identity in relation to memory is the subject of Barbara Żłobińska’s latest work, in which the artist looks at the aesthetics of mass-produced jewellery and finds in it an element of contact with fragile nature. Her clusters of flowers are supported by structural elements that are unwanted waste in industrial production. They are not just intimate mementoes, but reflect a complex relationship with local history and the environment.

One of the characteristics of the age of information overload is that we are constantly photographing our surroundings. Such overproduction and ceaseless consumption of images often results in beautiful things becoming ordinary and all-too-familiar. Untitled 12 by Radek Brousil is one photograph and four different ways of physically manipulating the print, so that a different part of the image appears each time. Referring to post-photographic practices, the work is a symbolic link to a new series of paintings dedicated to the politics of time. Both works question the memory of the material by undermining the medium of photography as a means of recording and fixing images. In his photographic transfers, the artist blends the print with the medium of painting, using oil paint to create a unified record that embodies an archive of broken clocks in public places. What we see, however, are extreme close-ups in which the mechanism of the hands takes on an almost organic form. Brousil challenges the idea of linear time by deforming, stretching or shortening it, thus preserving the useless and embedding his paintings in the ever-changing present.

Further away from virtual methods of data storage and closer to our bodies, there are biological-genetic solutions. Natural DNA has survived for thousands of years, while modern experiments show that synthetic DNA can store data for up to hundreds of thousands of years. In his organic-abstract sculptures, Miłosz Flis alludes to a futuristic yet functional method of data recording that is considered to be extremely durable and capacious. As he explores futuristic corporealities, Flis creates forms that are analogue visualisations of the process of digital generation of random shapes. While the Chewing Gum Form Generator represents an organic archive of the artist’s DNA producing further micro-bodies, its scaled-up structures (Lying and Twisted) mimic factory-made units.

In his search for the world’s most comprehensive archive, Bezimienny creates a vision of a historical place that has never existed. His landscape depicts the tower of the necromancer Xardas, which houses a library of secret books and manuscripts. The mysterious, angular landscape, taken from the iconic RPG series Gothic, is reminiscent of the Library of Babel in the short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Made up of infinite geometric rooms on a hexagonal plan, its collections contain all knowledge and every possible combination of letters. Most of them are completely chaotic and meaningless texts, but amongst them are all the works written and yet to be written.

The aforementioned most durable method of recording information* serves as the epilogue of the exhibition. In Wiktoria’s sculptures and Paweł Baśnik’s painting, stone, the a crumb of earth, becomes the most persistent observer, ready to take in any human trace. Everything that happens in the cloud, though seemingly “intangible,” has its physical reflection in reality – in the form of servers, infrastructure and resources that consume energy and create a carbon footprint. Wiktoria’s Imprint Sculptures  have been inspired by ecosexual practices. Activated during sensory encounters, the performative objects are tools enabling us to get physically closer to nature through communion and touch, by strengthening mental and spiritual connections. The closeness of skin and stone, resulting from the firm attachment of the sculptures to the body, causes the work to “become” anew with each successive contact. The salutary properties of stone bring comfort in a time of increasing overstimulation, when the body is alerting us to inner discomfort and tension. In Wiktoria’s works, the contact between nature and human-made infrastructure is re-established – the elements of the metal structures used by the artist are fragments of underwater pipelines in the English Channel and North Sea. Responding to the growing need to escape from the digital world into nature, her sculptures are not only historical objects straight from the earth’s interior, but contemporary healing amulets creating a space for contact. Paweł Baśnik, exploring the anxieties of the late Anthropocene, draws on the dilemmas of the digital age to create visions of an order yet to come. Using analogies to ancient motifs, he sees history repeating itself in a new, hybrid form, which integrates artificial intelligence with reality, fragmenting specific definitions of the world around us. Old figurative narratives about the Apocalypse have led the artist to abstract, archaeological explorations. His large-scale abstraction, which triggers associations with geological structures, pays homage to the primal drive of memory, materialising the power of nature, its wounds and how much more it can take.

* “Although it’s a primitive method, stone plaques can last for thousands of years as long as they are protected from the elements. Stone has great durability, but its capacity is of course limited.” (quoted after ChatGPT chat)

curator: Natalia Barczyńska

The event will be accompanied by a performance titled If I was a stone, I would wear myself  by Jagna Nawrocka and Bartosz Jakubowski  in a somatic dialogue with sculptures by Wiktoria.

The biological coating of bodies still defines the state of power, recognition, self-determination, and sense of security. The body and its sensations, our identity and desires are determined by geopolitics, laws, parliamentary debates, healthcare fund subsidies, language, and self-control in the face of harassment. In this context, our corporeality is not our individual property, something inviolable. The intimacy of people who are non-normative or facing crises must be made public to initiate a discussion on important and current issues that we face as a society. Therefore, our bodies and their use in artistic creation becomes tools of struggle and protest, and thus a political act.

The works of invited artists from Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine are a narrative of how social and political events impact individual bodily experiences. And also the story about the need for solidarity and freedom.

Opening of the exhibition as part of Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2024.

KROKI / STEPS is an artistic project about walking. About the practice, philosophy, culture, politics and art of walking. Three galleries – Studio BWA Wrocław, Entropia Gallery and Krupa Gallery – will show works that reflect on walking, or document the practice of wandering on foot. Artistic scenarios for individual walks, strolls and expeditions within the city will also be offered.

When we walk, the horizon of our experience is defined by the distance we are able to cover on our own feet. The collective exhibition KROKI / STEPS refers to the conceptual and performative foundations of the contemporary reflection on walking in art – from the motif of pilgrimage, through political steps, to walking in the aspect of the migration crisis. From walks in the virtual world to steps leading towards nature. Divided between three galleries located within a close (walking) distance to each other, the exhibition includes film documentation of performances, installations, objects, photographs and even a computer game. Strolling through the brushwood (Krzysztof Maniak), pilgrimages between metropolises (Robert Kuśmirowski), walking along a drying river (Mikołaj Szpaczyński) or crossing a city with a gun (Francis Alys) – these are just some of the diverse forms and meanings of walking on display.

The act of walking does not require any technology. A walker does not leave a carbon footprint. Walking is the most primal and timeless form of man’s relationship with space. The pace at which humans walk has remained constant throughout history, i.e. since our ancestors adopted an upright posture and began walking on two legs. The acceleration of the pace of life, work, consumption and information has not changed it, nor have technological developments. Walking does not occupy the mind but despite this, or rather precisely because of this, it leaves room for thinking – hence its close relationship with philosophising. “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord”, writes Rebecca Solnit in her book Wanderlust. A History of Walking. In turn, Friedrich Nietzsche – who calls the “patience of the buttocks” a sin against the Holy Spirit – urges in Ecce Homo: “Sit as little as possible”. The philosopher, himself a seasoned and passionate walker, recommended that no thought born in stillness should be trusted. So if there is a path on which to find the broken connections between mind and body, as well as body and the Others – the environment and nature – then the path must be walked.

The project – part of the Art Scene of the mBank New Horizons festival – refers to the film programme dedicated to walking. It is no coincidence: after all, the cinematic history begins with an image of walking people, Lumière Brothers’ Workers Exiting the Factory.

Artists: Francis Alys, Zuza Dolega, Entropia Gallery, Karolina Freino, Marcin Harlender, Hiwa K., Krystyna Jędrzejewska-Szmek and Hamza Aqrabawi, Alicja Jodko and Mariusz Jodko, Zofia Krawiec, Igor Krenz and Wojciech Niedzielko, Piotr Kopik, Jerzy Kosałka, Robert Kuśmirowski, Zbigniew Libera, Krzysztof Maniak, Honorata Martin, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Tomasz Opania, Piotr Pawlak, Joanna Pawlik, Yvonne Rainer and Sara Wookey, Total Refusal, Józef Robakowski, Irmina Rusicka, Mikołaj Szpaczyński, Klaudiusz Ślusarczyk, Joanna Wojsiat (formerly Podgórska), Zorka Wollny, Vova Vorotniov, Auguste Marie Louis Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière

Spirits is the artistic and main part of Kacper Wiatrak’s graduation work. This story about the artist’s childhood is a game of associations in which mental notes are reconstructed as handcrafted mementos, painted or made from cardboard. The eight juxtaposed paintings and objects hark back to past stories and conditions, complementing each other’s meanings. Together they provide a panorama of feelings, making it possible to return to the scenes and people they evoke, ultimately creating a series about growing up, saying goodbye and searching for identity.

The second, design part of Wiatrak’s graduation work is a graphic journey through Serwis – a gallery and studio co-created by the Zbiór collective. The exhibition is a presentation of the visual language created for a place designed as a new cultural venue on the map of Wrocław.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kacper Wiatrak (b. 1998 in Wrocław) is a visual artist and fifth-year student at the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. He usually works in painting, but he also creates objects and digital works. He treats his works as a diary – a proof of existence. It is a rather specific diary: Polish, bittersweet, self-ironic and full of contradictions. Wiatrak is a co-founder of Pracownia Serwis Gallery in the south of Wrocław and member of the Zbiór collective.

The Ping Pong World Championship
➝ 13 July2024, 4PM

ABOUT THE CHAMPIONSHIP
How many times have you played table tennis in an art gallery? If never, then come join us for the only event of its kind in the world! Sixteen players will face off in the tournament, sweating it out for prizes and, most importantly, certificates. Can you play? Come and prove it! Can’t play? Come anyway, maybe you can! Everyone can join the tournament; it’s first come, first served.
“The Ping Pong World Championship” is organized in collaboration with Serwis, accompanying Kacper Wiatrak’s diploma exhibition. Serwis is an independent gallery and studio in the south of Wrocław, co-created by the Zbiór collective, of which the artist is a member.

RULES
1. Actually, this isn’t a world championship, just an amateur tournament. And it’s not ping-pong but table tennis, so please don’t bring paddles with sandpaper
2. Up to 16 players can join the tournament
3. Participation in the tournament is determined by the order of applications
4. If you’re one of the first 16 to sign up, we’ll let you know by email
5. If any of the 16 lucky players don’t show up, someone from the waitlist will take their spot
6. Winners get prizes

JOIN THE TOURNAMENT
➝ https://forms.gle/nN61wSWDUGpmWw4D7
free admission

We are pleased to inform that Krupa Gallery participates in NADA Villa Warsaw.
Between May 16th and 19th, 44 galleries from Poland and around the world will present their exhibitions at the historic Villa Gawrońskich in Warsaw. Krupa Gallery will have the pleasure to show works by Pola Dwurnik, Radek Brousil, and Miłosz Flis. 

Throughout the spring, KRUPA GALLERY will present the first iteration of the SHOWROOM series, which aims to present current and recent artistic phenomena and attitudes among the artists working with the gallery. These will often be works almost freshly transferred from their ateliers, which show current observations and explorations on an ongoing basis. 

The leitmotif of the first exhibition of this series is the phenomenon of the spring and summer solstices, and their translation into energy states that cause stress and discomfort associated with moments of transition, transformation and change. After all, astronomical observations often provide a starting point for justifying spiritual experiences or serve as alternative methods of predicting the future. The variety of works on display provides a rich overview of a variety of approaches to creative techniques, while the convergence of common sentiments influences the coherence and interpenetration of certain narratives, which at the time of the solstice influence the taking up of related themes of cyclicity, time, change and memory.

artists:

Karolina Balcer, Aleksander Baszyński, Paweł Baśnik, Radek Brousil, Bolesław Chromry, Pola Dwurnik, Miłosz Flis, Michał Gątarek, Zuzanna Janosz, Kateryna Lysovenko, Iza Opiełka, Łukasz Stokłosa, Wiktoria

Kateryna Lysovenko’s first solo exhibition at Krupa Gallery presents a new series of works, marking a significant change in the artist’s work.

Kateryna Lysovenko is constructing her works using a network of ideas, presented with a range of references. From classical mythology, tropes and motifs, to ideologies and contemporary events, as well as the way those are being reflected in images. Often locally addressing particular events, drawing a lot from the experience of Ukrainian people, her works tackle key problems of human condition and universal struggles.

ruins – we help them grow back

In Where Ruins Grow Like Plants or Child Body Lysovenko draws from the history of the ancient city of Tyras, which happened to pass from one country to another through the ages. From the 6th century BC, when the Greeks created this colony, the city and its fortress, had its name changed numerous times. Asprokastron in the Middle Ages, the Latin Album Castrum, Cetatea Albă in Romanian, Turkish Akkerman and Ukrainian Bilhorod – are just a few of its designations, usually meaning ‘white castle’. Subsequent walls had been erected on the predecessor’s foundations. And yet the place itself stayed local, and formed the identity of its inhabitants. The political ideologies driving each of the conquests served the walls in the end. 

The new series focuses on the identity of the place and body of the city. The embodiment of the city is both an intellectual and painterly gesture. Lysovenko is aiming to revert the logic of oppression, by giving subjectivity to what remains in constant instability or crisis, and to those who are oppressed. Of the ruins she says that we help them grow back.

poetical, not epic

A significant change is developing throughout Where Ruins Grow Like Plants or Child Body. The gesture of repositioning the actors in traditional symbolic system, inherited from antiquity and continued through the ages, has given the artist means to question violence and oppression. But in the new works, Lysovenko goes one step further – she breaks free from where the Other still remained different, even despite being safe, but the eye/gaze of the Normal remained. Throughout the show, one can see this perspective disappearing, and being replaced by the point of view, and thus the narrative, of the subject. The stories told in the new works are not to be epic, but poetical. The same is reflected by the painterly language – throughout the show linear forms give way to more substantial and bodily ones. 

Kateryna Lysovenko is a Ukrainian artist based in Vienna. She’s working in painting, using text, drawing and monumental painting as her other media.

Lysovenko is engaged in the study of the relationship between ideology and painting, as well as production of the image of the victim in politics and art. One of her most used means is the figure of the Other. In her work she is engaging traditions and inspirations ranging from antiquity to the present day. Lysovenko regards painting as a language that can be instrumentalized or liberated.

Since Russian full scale invasion on Ukraine, her works have become one of the most recognized images of the Ukrainian voice and perspective. But her historical and artistic reflection has a wider, universal and humanistic angle.

Her works are included in the key public collections, including Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Museum of Contemporary Art w Kijowie or Museum Ludwig in Budapest.

Toxic People: Bolesław Chromry

feat: Chair, Magdalena Sawicka, DOOM 3K *

Boleslaw Chromry’s new solo exhibition is a painterly collection of portraits of toxic people from his life, where his memory extends from the present to his early childhood and school years. Among the characters depicted will be old friends, family, teachers and even personified four-legged figures. These silhouettes are described by Chromry through the essence extracted from their essence and the metaphorical and symbolic attributes attributed to them that make the presented characters seem familiar, close to them.

In this project, Chromry draws attention to fears and all that is unpleasant and uncomfortable – especially in relationships with others. He creates a kind of universal toxin, whose words or actions leave an emotional mark on someone who experiences it. He does this with the help of silhouettes of unspecified demonic creatures transforming into more abstract entities or quotes from the statements of specific characters. For this reason, the words with which he frames his works are as important an element as their visual layer.

A few years ago, Boleslaw Chromry created a work on a large-format canvas on which he inscribed a whole list of dozens of names of toxic (according to him) people. Some people who found themselves on the blacklist were even appalled and surprised to find themselves there. The painting represents a sort of symbolic beginning, which has returned as a series of works not only relating to his own experiences and hatred of others, but to a broader story about social oppression, stigmatization and the patterns we are thrown into like a spider’s web from a young age. In the painting series, Chromry dissects social expectations and family relationships, citing situations that can trigger unpleasant memories in us.

The fact that the traits of the DDD syndrome (children of dysfunctional homes) often come from different sources was written about by Joanna Flis in her book What’s Wrong with Me?. The millennial generation has grown up in many changes, where harmful patterns and schemes were passed on to us. For some reason, we were smuggled with golden advice not to feel, not to come out ahead, to work a lot and not to admit our mistakes or weaknesses, and to make our appearance fit into a rigidly defined
gender framework[1]. Such values were passed on to us in schools, the media, and churches, which was not necessarily related to the way our parents were raised. Because of which there was (and probably still is to some extent) a general acquiescence to seemingly innocent verbal oppression, which in the long run leaves a lasting mark. Chromry, through his use of characteristic memetic humor, smuggles in the bittersweet realities of life in post-transformation Poland.

The irony, careless aesthetics and hand-cut raw canvases highlight a time of childish naiveté. A time when we were unaware of the toxic patterns we would be dissecting in therapy rooms as adults. The artist’s own experience becomes a trigger for a broader
discussion about how this society that shaped us is poisoned. A common element in the system that has inflicted such a fate on us is certainly school, which continues to manifest itself in nightmares even in adulthood. “School alienates us […] makes us begin to mix concepts”[2] so that we don’t know what we ourselves want or what direction we want to go next, we are imposed on “good jobs” and our creativity is stifled. Teachers, grades, tardiness, homework, bullying by peers, are reflected back to us like hiccups in the form of stress and panic attacks at work, when we have long since left our family homes and are trying to function as adults. The education system, which is not adapted to modern needs, has not yet undergone fundamental changes since the early 19th century, when the Prussian model was established. Playing with associations and discomfort, the artist starts from very personal traumas and experiences, while talking about common ways of oppression that are close to everyone. By recreating memories and reckoning with a poisoned past, Chromry performs a cleansing reconstruction of the dream school, where the roles are reversed and all the unfriendly teachers end up on the donkey’s bench. The people recalled by Chromry – although anonymous to the viewer – become a symbolic collective wound, which we cover up with forgetfulness, ignorance or, on the contrary, tear up without
letting it heal. A twist is that through all the experiences evoked above, we become toxic to ourselves, or unaware of being toxic to others, even our loved ones. Chromry’s last work in this exhibition dots the i’s, leaving viewers with space for self-reflection.

[1] Joanna Flis, What’s wrong with me? On living in a dysfunctional home, environment in Poland and how we (not) deal with it, Znak Publishing House, Krakow 2023 (only polish version)

[2] Mikołaj Marcela, Selections. How schools destroy people, societies and the world,
Krakow 2021 (only polish version)

curator: Natalia Barczyńska

BOLESŁAW CHROMRY

(born 1987) – graduate of the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. He is a painter and illustrator. Under an artistic pseudonym, he creates graphic novels, zines, covers and posters. He is a columnist for USTA Magazine and Notes Na 6. Tygodni. Mostly collaborates with cultural institutions, art, press, publishing houses and media. He has illustrated for Gazeta Wyborcza, Wysokie Obcasy, Pismo, Szum and Contemporary Lynx, among others. Creator of hundreds of drawings commenting on post-transformation Poland. Through a seemingly careless visual-textual poetic narrative, he creates a drawing universe in which characters from pop culture, politics, and adolescence meet.

Neptune Frost screening – 24.11, 7 PM

Bad Form Custom fashion show – 25.11, 6 PM

SE99ZY

Iza Opiełka and Miłosz Flis venture together to explore the body of the future. Drawing on futurist visions of the world as if taken straight from Cronenberg’s films, they weave trans-humanist scenarios. Starting from the notion of the “valley of the uncanny,” the artists create works balancing on the verge of aesthetic awe and repulsion. Their close and constant dialogue penetrates the deformations and analogies of corporeality in the context of its relationship with technology and the contemporary ecosystem as such. The title is a blend of the words “existence” and “sex.” The digits represent something artificial, triggering associations with the increasing mathematisation of human reality. Se99zy is based on the contrast and duality of the repulsive and the soothingly harmonious, like the inside of the human body. 

Human evolution has failed to keep up with mankind’s newest creations, leading to a situation when our bodies are no longer adapted to the immeasurably rapid technological advances and the speed of life. As a result of this overstimulation, in an attempt to adapt and improve our performance, we demand more of ourselves than we can get. Impatient with our slow adaptation, we invent tools to support our physical capabilities. Noting these changes, Opiełka creates paintings inspired by modern ergonomic design, which, being so close to the human skin, blends with it and thus blurs the boundaries between object and body. Flis, on the other hand, makes sculptural forms referring to the imagery of primordial single-celled organisms whose ambiguity evokes more associations than it appears at first glance. The result is a simultaneous dialogue in which history cyclically recurs, where future and past meet on biomorphic surfaces.

The works by Opiełka and Flis will be accompanied by a soundscape created by digital mental data and kaliente ilich, and later in November, we invite you to a performance by Bad Form Custom.

–The new world, which might not yet exist, is already present within human thoughts – it’s leaning out in the dreams, reflexes and thought structures, which already adjust to the wings to come. The new painterly works by Paweł Baśnik are set within the anxieties of late anthropocene, fear of the end of one living and visual forms and beginning of others.

Digital revolution has undermined the classic “western” dichotomous division into nature and culture. It has created a fear of – not yet fully defined but already expected – digital world, and a new kind of “digital” visuals. Paweł Baśnik is reaching for antique tropes of metamorphosis and liquid transition of natural and human space, to form loose analogies with the posthuman topic of his works. He’s interested in the hybrid, mixed realities and the transgression. On the painterly level the artist is confronting the two visual traditions – the classic, painterly tradition and the new, emerging digital/virtual esthetics. 

Baśnik’s paintings speak of the future at the feeling and imagination level. The artist is not attempting to use artistic tools to create a speculative prediction of a scientific ambition. He is rather working with the cultural codes and visual vocabulary. 

curator: Antoni Burzyński

Pawel Baśnik (b.1992)

Wroclaw-based painter, whose works circulate around vanitatuve themes and historiosophical motifs. In the most recent series, the artist is referring to ancient motifs of transformation, discussing the dying biosphere transforming into new technicized life forms. The visuality of his paintings stretches between the pre-modern way of thinking about painting and the contemporary digital iconosphere.

Winner of many contemporary art awards, such as ,,Warto” plebiscite of Gazeta Wyborcza, the 3rd prize and the prize of Magazyn Szum at the 44th Biennial of Painting Bielska Jesień, and ”Emocje” prize awarded by Radio Wroclaw Kultura.

In addition to his individual artistic work, Paweł Baśnik is associated with numerous artistic projects. He is a co-founder of the painting collective Bezimienny (ig: @bezimiennyart) and the art group The Nihilist Church (ig: @thenihilistchurch).

pawelbasnik.pl

Selected solo exhibitions:

2022 SWAB Art Fairs, Pabellon Italia, Barcelona.

2022 Last People, Krupa Gallery, Wroclaw, Poland.

2019 Emerging Lines, Kunstraum Potsdamer, Berlin

Selected group exhibitions:

2023 Hyperspace, Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw.

2022 The Discomfort of Evening, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw.

2022 Tricking Time, Holden Garage, Berlin

2022 The Power of Imagination, Rondo Sztuki, Katowice.

2022 Deep into Painting II, National Museum Wroclaw.

2021 Bielska Jesień Painting Biennale, BWA Bielsko Biała

2021 Psychopomp, Ossolineum Wrocław

2021 The Night will Drive a Heart, Contemporary Museum Wroclaw

2021 Ken’s Aunt, Local 30, Warsaw

2020 Battlefield, BWA Bielsko-Biala

2020 Wiosna na osiedlu Bema, Arsenal Gallery, Białystok

2020 XIII Geppert Competition, BWA Wrocław Główny, Wrocław

2019 Young Polish Painting, National Museum in Gdansk.

I think I’ve been there before 

Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė & Justina Vilčinskaitė (LT), Antti Auvinen (FI), Iván Argote (CO), Aleksander Baszyński (UA), Meryem Bayram (BE), Aurélie Belair (FR), Louisa Gagliardi (CH), Veronika Ivashkevich (BY), Anton Karyuk (UA), Anni Laakso (FI), Hadrien Loumaye (BE), Karolina Majewska (PL), Sebastian Milewski (PL), Katrīna Neiburga (LV), Izabela Olesińska (PL), Iza Opiełka (PL), Angyvir Padilla (VE), Alicja Pakosz (PL), Łukasz Stokłosa (PL), Why Quit (Karolina Balcer & Iwona Ogrodzka) (PL)

***

I think I’ve been there before is a travelling exhibition project that grew out of observations and research into certain states that occur in transit. The exhibition’s first iteration took place in Lithuania at the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre, and straight from there it travels to Wroclaw to transform and react to the context of a new space and geographical point. It takes as its framework the notion of liminality and “non-places” considered in three interweaving paths: 

I. Correlations of architecture as a transit of space and time. 

Thinking about a certain state of anxiety and discomfort that architecture itself can evoke, one can recall public crowded places such as waiting rooms, buses, and airports. Or, on the contrary; vacant lots transformed by time or the development deeds of large cities; hotel corridors straight out of “The Shining” movie – which seems to lead to no particular destination. Following Juhani Pallasmaa, the key role of architecture is a shelter that is a projection of our measurements and needs, it is supposed to enhance our sense of reality and subjectivity. From the sociological perspective, the issue of space in people’s lives remains on the sidelines concerning other studied currents, and there are still some blind spots in public spaces in the form of liminal places that disrupt this order. The first layer of the exhibition deals with situations, feelings, and changes that begin in the architecture and the immediate surroundings, which are shared together, and often seem to be the background for internal experiences. 

II. Territories, domesticity, lost bodies. 

The second layer of the exhibition is exploring the levels of social and political in-betweens in the oppressive, transforming world in which we are anxiously trying to find ourselves. It addresses topics such as displacement caused by war or economics, diasporic populations, and the state of being unsheltered. It questions the idea of home and the territories, the dreamlike areas of doubt. With the rise in industrialisation and the emergence of leisure as an acceptable form of play separate from work, liminoid experiences are becoming more and more common. Often not of our own volition, we live in a time of constant change, where it is difficult to define our place of habitation. Despite this, we somehow strive for comfortable housing that would meet all our needs and be a solace, and stability. At the same time, the world around us is becoming noisier, more dynamic, and cramped, where the boundaries between work, home, and spiritual space are blurring more than ever before.

III. Internal corridors, emotions, disappearance. 

The exhibition ends with abstract emotional suspensions on a more personal level, which causes the feeling of being on the threshold. Liminality appears there as undefined limbo, between our relationships with nature, technology, and spirituality. The notion of liminality has even become the subject of art memes, which, functioning in the metaverse, perhaps show that we can’t quite cope with certain states or haven’t had time to work through them yet. This perspective completes the juxtaposition of the stories about the lack of structured processes for dealing with states such as alienation, illness, and grief, which are about change, disappearance, and transition. At a time when there is an increasing focus on mental health and the topic is not being downplayed, the interweaving of internal themes with what physically surrounds us is becoming something increasingly oficial in social discourses, including art. 

***

Through its open and transformative format, the exhibition creates a platform to reflect on public and virtual places of transition that seem to belong to no one. With the rise in industrialization and the emergence of leisure as an acceptable form of play separate from work, liminoid experiences are becoming more and more common. Given the often nomadic nature of their work, this phenomenon largely affects those engaged in artistic practice, where it is difficult to define a place of habitation. The notion of liminality has even become the subject of art memes that, while functioning in metaverses, thus fit perfectly into being in
„no one’s” place. The exhibition seeks to observe the relationship between liminal places and territory, domesticity, and emotional states of transition, addressing issues of diaspora, political or economic displacement, homelessness, and abstract states of suspension. Through the variety of twenty-two artistic practices, the project juxtaposes the layers of transitional states in an oppressive, transforming world in which we anxiously try to find our place. The performative part of the exhibition responds to the anxieties of uncertainty caused by liminoid experiences by observing reactions, measuring space, analysing emotions, and
asking where home is.

Natalia Barczyńska

Organised by: Krupa Art Foundation and Klaipėda Culture Communication Center (KCCC) 

Supported by: European Union and Goethe Institut, Flemish Government, Krupa Gallery

This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. 

Mmmelting

Melting comes with the end of winter – it can prevent the frost from killing the young plants and bring collective support to no longer be afraid of the future. As we melt, we become immersed in collective sadness.

In spite of using different visual languages, what unites Łukasz Stokłosa and Radek Brousil is their exploration of sensitivity and a similar approach to key social, cultural and environmental issues. The artists take a critical stance towards attitudes such as the stigmatisation of LGBTQ people, racism, and unsustainable industries.

The exhibition is a melancholic tale of exclusion, collective trauma, loss, and that which remains. Mmmelting is about transience, intimacy, the body, vulnerability, mourning, but it is also a harbinger of relief in an unbearable situation and a tribute to youth.

The story revolves around different timelines, blurring the boundaries between the living, the inanimate, and the artificial. The exhibition abounds in nostalgic references to the mass culture of the 1990s, which is when the two artists were growing up. Stokłosa draws mainly on cinematography and TV series, picking up on quirky themes and marginal characters. Brousil, on the other hand, focuses on the atmosphere of the era, its characteristic colours, and music – as demonstrated by his textile installations from t-shirts with names of the bands that were close to him (such as NO AGE).

Łukasz Stokłosa explores the boundaries of truthfulness through painting, which, as he says, has grown into his body. He looks through an emotional filter to pay attention to the elusive dissonances that make us uncertain of what we see. The featured works by Stokłosa include a continuation of a series of paintings drawing on the homoerotic pornographic films of the 1980s. Given the context of the AIDS crisis at that time, they, therefore, commemorate figures who are no longer alive. Back then, the diagnosis was tantamount to a death sentence – the virus killed the young prematurely, just as an early frost kills budding flowers before they have a chance to bloom. In comparison with the current pandemic, the events from before the breakthrough in HIV research are viewed very differently in the USA. Today, the New York Times chronicles those who died of covid-19, whereas in the AIDS era, the public was indifferent to the number of victims until the 1990s. With regard to the situation in Poland, the stigmatisation of queer communities follows in the footsteps of the path in the USA when the AIDS epidemic broke out. What we see in both cases is an epidemic of exclusion. 

While Stokłosa rewrites history by highlighting figures that typically remain in the shadows, Brousil makes an activist statement on an uncertain future, using poetic symbolism and a game of associations. Faced with unresolved social and environmental problems, the artist offers seemingly banal yet thoughtful and poignant solutions. The slogans he smuggles into his photographs, sculptures, and objects smack of the bitterness of misunderstanding. They are mostly excerpts from the lyrics of indie-emo bands, which to a large extent determine the titles of his works or their contents, as in the case of the ceramic hey sorrow, where are you? In his most recent work, Brousil draws inspiration from his observation of athletes’ gestures of motivating each other, usually just before a game. In this case, however, silhouettes of different skin colours come together to mourn and support each other in their shared grief, creating a safe place for the viewers. Today’s problems caused by the consequences of thoughtless human decisions increase the vulnerability to be hurt, against which Brousil’s works do not seem to guard us at all. Instead, they offer understanding, empathy, and intimacy. They create a safe refuge. 

The dialogue emerging between the two artists shatters heteronormative patterns, embracing uncertainty, fantasy, and empathy. The two perspectives of exclusion meet on the surface of intimacy, vulnerability, and mutual support, which, like the melting ice, brings a ray of hope.

curator: Natalia Barczyńska

***

Radek Brousil is a Czech artist who makes installations, working predominantly with textiles, alongside ceramics, film, photography, and video. His theme addresses social testimony, presenting an activist expression of an uncertain future. Brousil defines social, cultural, and environmental problems using unexpected interpretations and terminology, and chooses instead to look at these issues on a symbolic, personal, and emotional level. His interest focuses on post-colonial tendencies in contemporary artistic discourse, for example, his investigation into the issue of the origin and distribution of flowers or textiles. Through his work with textiles, Brousil emphasises their Czech origin and African destiny, enabling him to highlight the problems of the market economy and its power structures. Radek Brousil graduated from the Studio of Photography at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague. In 2015 he received the Oscar Čepan Award for Young Visual Artists. His works are included in local and international private and institutional collections.

Łukasz Stokłosa does figurative painting, often inspired by mass culture, films, and series. He feels comfortable with the aesthetics of kitsch. Traveling and visiting historic buildings and landmarks is the source of motifs that he later subjects to transformations. He often uses the somewhat archaic strategy of homoerotic camouflage, which he nevertheless finds interesting; he also draws on the aesthetics of camp. By juxtaposing distant and foreign elements in his practice, he compiles a peculiar cabinet of curiosities. This way of constructing the narrative is especially noticeable in his sculptures-objects. His interests revolve around contemporary interpretations of history and past events. What often characterises his paintings are homoerotic images inspired by gay pornography. Stokłosa’s paintings are sensual and intelligent, appealing and repelling at the same time; there is often more to them than meets the eye, just like in the case of film noir.

Art and nature will always struggle with each other until they overcome each other and triumph, drawing the same lines that are conquered and conquer at the same time.

– Maria Sibylla Merian (b. 1647, artist, explorer of nature, traveller and pioneer of entomology)

“The project BOTANICAL PAINTING WORKSHOP – Triumph of Immateriality emerged out of the need to continue my nature inspired activities in the visual arts. It is a continuation of Locus Amoenus, an action intended to revive the idea of open-air painting workshops in the green space of Wrocław.

My fascination with the soothing effect of vegetation, coupled with a great need to explore nature after my separation with it due to the pandemic, triggered in me the need to return to the garden motif in my work. Whereas previously I approached the theme mainly by analysing an idea or archetype, since my last project Locus Amoenus I have put more emphasis on creating in the direct presence of nature.

The project BOTANICAL PAINTING WORKSHOP – Triumph of Immateriality is based on the idea of establishing a painting studio in a gallery space. It assumes direct contact with the viewer and the process of exchanging experiences.

The central motif of the exhibition and the main object of painting will be a green installation in the Krupa Gallery space titled Living Still Life, inspired by the baroque motif of vanitas in Flanders and Dutch painting.

With its refined arrangement and tasteful composition, the lavish installation will be subjected to the natural processes of growth and decay, never to remain the same.

In this way, we gain the opportunity to observe the transformation of one form into another, the flowering, withering or even death. The ongoing metamorphosis on display will become a triumph of the invisible forces at work in both nature and art.

The installation consists of potted plants, cut plants and mycelium with spores”.

– Monika Konieczna

As a teacher of Visual Structures at the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław, Monika Konieczna has for the past six years invited students to keep Visual Notebooks in which they record their observations of various forms in the natural space, the changing light and colour, in search of different ways of representing them. By experiencing the omnipresence of nature impulses, they learn to consciously manage and select visual stimuli. When the eye and brain have to make a quick selection from multiple impulses, creative work follows a completely different course than when working under “controlled” conditions.

As part of the BOTANICAL PAINTING WORKSHOP – Triumph of Immateriality project, the artist invites the audience to her temporary studio at Krupa Gallery, where, surrounded by a vegetal installation, the visitors can not only watch the artist at work, but also join her in the creative process.

We warmly invite you to the plant-filled space arranged by the artist, where you will be able to contemplate nature, relax and create together.

Five painting easels, sheets of paper and pencils are available on site.

You are welcome to bring your own painting utensils: canvases, cards, paints, etc.

www.monikakonieczna.weebly.com

Artifictions is an intentionally coined, previously non-existent word combining two semantic areas: artificiality (falseness, unnaturalness) and fiction (fantasy, invention, illusion). Such a combination therefore creates a tautological linguistic construct, whose individual parts repeat their meaning.

At the same time, however, formulating the title of the exhibition as Artifictions triggers the reflection on whether the artificiality of fiction makes the former even more fictional, or whether the opposite is true. For if fiction, which as a rule is far removed from reality, is labelled with the adjective artificial, this can also mean that in perception it becomes a reflection of something quite real. Looking at Monika Polak’s works, it is impossible to say whether the artist is showing something artificial in her works, or whether we are looking at an artistic representation of sights and objects from the real world. The sizeable canvases depict images that could just as well be viewed under a microscope or through an astronomical telescope. Next to them, membranes resembling tissue extracted from once living organisms are immersed in glass vessels of various sizes. But all this is an illusion presented for a very specific purpose – an illusion created by the artist in her own experimental way by combining traditional painterly pigments with all sorts of resins, media and chemical additives. Thus, the paintings made on classic canvas, but also, for example, on XPS panels (recycled building material), are images that just seem to resemble the actual micro- and macrocosms. In fact, they are abstract compositions created with specially applied dyes and painting media. Similarly, the membranes immersed in liquid in glass vessels, although resembling biological preparations that would normally be preserved in formalin, turn out to be artificially created objects.

Why does the artist play such a game with the viewer by constructing this illusion? Why does she create an artificial impression of viewing objects and images from a biological laboratory? Is her intention to mislead us? Nothing could be further from the truth. Through her works, Monika Polak wants to make the viewer confront some very serious questions about humanism and how it places the human in the role of a host exploiting the natural environment. Through her artistic actions, she signals the phenomena that already occur in our reality, where what is artificial penetrates and merges with biological matter (as, for example, in the case of plastiglomerates, i.e. completely new forms of ecosystem, which are more and more frequently fished out of the oceans), and where the boundary between the living, the real and the inanimate or processed is gradually becoming blurred. It prompts us to reflect on, among other things, transhumanism, which is a utopian movement advocating the use of science (neurotechnology, biotechnology and nanotechnology) to improve the human condition in general and build a sense of happiness. Problems posed in this way even lead to consideration in the context of ethics, bioethics and ecology.

How far, then, can the humans go in the exploitation of our immediate environment and, more broadly, the natural environment? How deeply can we (and should we at all?) interfere with our own bodies, but also with the bodies of other living beings, in order to ultimately improve them? Where, in all this, is the line between what is ethical and what is unethical? Finally – where does the real end and the artificial begin…?

​Monika Polak (b. 1992, Tarnobrzeg)

In 2017 she graduated with honours from the E. Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław with a degree in painting. She has also completed the Interdepartmental Doctoral Studies at the Academy. Recipient of the Scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage for Outstanding Achievements (2016), Artistic Scholarship of the Mayor of Wrocław (2015, 2016), J. Grotowski Scholarship (2019).

Winner of several awards, including the Artistic Award of the University of the Arts in Poznań. She has participated in many exhibitions, including 251st RA Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London; BP Portrait Award 2018, National Portrait Gallery, London; Emerging Lines #1, Galerie du Crous, Paris; What For / What After, Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wrocław.

In her works she explores the relationship between organic, inorganic and synthetic matter and consequences of technological development, thus drawing attention to the problems of the age of the Anthropocene. She refers to concepts and qualities such as human/inhuman, animate/artificial, micro/macro, past/future, nature/culture, abstraction/figuration. She uses mainly materials of artificial origin, emphasising their current ubiquity, but also their potential to create new forms by usurping the qualities of living beings.

Lovehammer is a project by Jan Możdżyński and Sebulec, in which the two young artists reinterpret and queer a popular, “typically male” hobby – the battle games based on miniature figurines from the Warhammer series. They create their own universe and game in keeping with their vision of the world, which is completely different from the violent original.

—

Warhammer is one of the most popular series of figure games, in which players recruit and command armies that later clash on the battlefield. Drawing on the exaggerated and conventionalised aesthetics of violence, the series has become a cultural phenomenon comprising books, films and computer games. In it, powerful fantastic armies fight countless battles in an endless cosmic war.

In the Age of Lovehammer exhibition, the artists use motifs and tropes characterising this type of entertainment, as well as inspiration from manga, fantasy and legends, to queer violence-based attitudes and turn the mechanics of battle into a love idiom. It is both a visual fantasy and a social necessity – as advocates of love and equality, feminists, but also fans of battle games, Sebulec and Możdżyński propose to change the stereotypical, antagonistic perspective into a relationship based on care, love and affection. They want to play, but on their own terms, reflecting what they themselves believe in.

Lovehammer is both a visual fantasy and a social demand – it is a proposal based on popular entertainment that challenges the dominant logic of conflict and struggle, questioning war as one of the founding myths and a way of building relationships. Sebulec and Możdżyński subvert the model example of the logic of conflict. Their world crosses the boundaries of the heteronormative gaze and the burden of historical borrowings and social traditions.

Age of Lovehammer is the second installment in the Lovehammer project. This time, the artists have expanded their universe and created a space that allows the audience to become actively involved.

Following the example of other wargame realms, the artists treat Lovehammer as an independent universe. This time, the exhibition is set in the Warp World, which is inhabited by Fetishes who are continuously headed to the Core – the unique interior of each of us, made up of the sum of our experiences, ideas and encounters. This journey is repeated many times in the course of our lives, and for some it never ends. Lovehammer is a record of this journey, and the players can decide how it goes and what values will shape the Warp World.

The two miniature armies encountered in the Age of Lovehammer are Sebulec’s Beautiful Beasts and Możdżyński’s Repentants (Crunchies).

Repentants (Crunchies) are a cloud of feelings, ideas, impressions and lives. They are fluid, never unambiguously defined; changeable, escaping heteronorms, patriarchy and the confines of gender. They draw power from the night, the whisper of whisperers and witch rituals. Transgression is their nature, transgender reversal is their method.

Repentants (Crunchies) are about:

transience, change, transformation, transition, body, spirit, moment, fluidity, gender, gender-fluid, social contract, norm, heteronorm, patriarchy, mismatch, dimorphism, transgenderism, transvestism, feminism, mysticism, ritual, tarot, crowley, witch, whisper, whisperer, night, consciousness, memory, historical memory

Sebulec’s Beautiful Beasts represent non-normativity, people who have been rejected, in crisis, forced to hide their identity. Their beauty is their scars, their vulnerability, their path, their strength.

“I look in the mirror and I feel like smashing it,” raps watchmedieslowly, an emo rapper of the youngest generation. The Beautiful Beasts are wild, clumsy and unsure of themselves. Will they be able to embark on the inward journey and love themselves anew?

The Beautiful Beasts are about:

corporeality, queerness, fur, muscles, danger, seduction, jaws, fangs, saliva, biting, eating oneself, flesh, ritual, skinning/revealing the inside, chaos, rebellion, armour, touch, tenderness, wounds, veins, magic, nature, symmetry, metal, hot bulls, werewolves, mermaids.

The entire exhibition is also a game in its own right. Throughout its duration, the audience will have the possibility to take turns and move the figurines-works of art at specific times.

The gameplay rules for the Age of Lovehammer in Warp World were created in collaboration with Paul Kimczak.

Press:

Vogue.pl
Wyborcza.pl
Wyborcza Warszawa
Poptown
MonopolMgazin.de
Arterritory
Dwutygodnik
Sztuka Czasopismo
MagazynSzum.pl

The Krupa Gallery Summer Stage is a series of exhibitions and accompanying cultural events held during the holiday season in the gallery’s temporary seat on the Old Town Boulevard in Wrocław. The programme focuses on the presentation of young artists and new, interesting phenomena in art.

The project emerged out of the desire and need to look for solutions that would promote and popularise contemporary art and actively support artists’ work and development. The purpose of the initiative is also to promote cooperation between the private sector and the field of culture and art.

The Krupa Gallery Summer Stage is organised in cooperation with the Makima Group. Selected works featured at the exhibitions will be purchased for the Krupa Gallery Foundation collection.

EXHIBITIONS:

Aleksander Baszynski
Politics of Sound
10.06 – 31.07.2022

Veronika Ivashkevich
I don’t wanna wake up from this tonight
10.06 – 31.07.2022

Pink sadness is the sadness of white anchovies. It is the sadness of deprivation, of going without, of having to swallow when your throat is no bigger than an acupuncture pin; it’s the sadness of mushrooms born with heads too big for their bodies, the sadness of having the soles come off your only pair of shoes, or your favorite pair, it makes no difference, pink sadness cannot be measured by a gameshow host, it is the sadness of shame when you have done nothing wrong, pink sadness is not your fault, and though even the littlest twinge may cause it, it is the vast bushy top on the family tree of sadness, whose faraway roots resemble a colossal squid with eyes the size of soccer balls.

– Mary Ruefle, My Private Property, Wave Books, 2016

In her series of essays entitled My Private Property, American poet Mary Ruefle describes various colours of sadness. Blue sadness is the sadness of reverie and nostalgia. Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, insomnia and the crescent moon. Orange sadness is the sadness of anxiety, yellow – of surprises, naps and eggs. Brown sadness is simple, white is the sadness of radio waves travelling endlessly in space.

Ivashkevich’s practice is tinged with a specific aura of nostalgia and melancholy. As in Ruefle’s case, in works by Ivashkevich sadness is mixed with joy, trivial and common things are juxtaposed with matters of the utmost importance, thus gaining a poetic dimension.

Ivashkevich often draws on scenes from the films she has watched. They are barely recognisable, however, because she intertwines them with products of her own imagination and memories from the past. In this way, a series of intriguing stories with unexpected twists and turns has emerged.

Seemingly superficial beauty, which Ivashkevich spices up with an admixture of absurdity, reveals a world full of mysteries and surreal scenarios. Faceless or backward-facing figures; a composition borrowed from Masato Seto’s photography, in which the toy object is replaced with the skeleton of a cheetah – these and other elements in Ivashkevich’s works heighten the sense of anxiety and even horror, leaving the viewer in the sphere of guesses and speculation. They depict the thin line that separates a dream from a nightmare.

Alongside cinema, sleep and the painting process provide Ivashkevich with a springboard to escape from reality. They create an intimate space, a precious area of private property, to which we are temporarily granted access.

Veronika Ivashkevich

Born in 1992 in Minsk, Belarus, she has graduated from the Minsk State College of Art and Design (Department of Painting) and Saint Petersburg Stieglitz Academy of Fine Arts (Department of Conservation and Restoration of Painting). In 2016, she received a scholarship from the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław; in 2021 – within the Gaude Polonia programme. Her works have been shown at individual and collective exhibitions in Belarus, Russia, Bulgaria and the USA.
She works as an art conservator.
She lives in Warsaw, Poland.

* title borrowed from Lana del Rey’s song entitled Dark Paradise

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

– Karl Marx

In the era of being “online,” freedom of speech resonates as information overload, in which contact with reality is as blurred as the boundaries of truth.

Analysing the characteristic phenomena of the Cold War leads to the conclusion that the current information field has long been ploughed by propaganda and disinformation. The effectiveness of the two contributed to the collapse of the USSR. When the sounds of the Cold War began to fade away, the empty space was immediately filled with the noise of information warfare.

Having witnessed the conflicts in Western Europe in recent years, I experience the polarisation and chaos of facts on my own skin.

Each of us, consciously or not, is a participant in the information war. We ask ourselves: Where is this sound coming from and where exactly is it supposed to go?

What is the Politics of Sound?

Aleksander Baszynski

Born in 1993 in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, Sasza has graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kiev and since 2017 he has studied at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław.
Winner of the Main Prize in the 3^rd edition of the Wojciech Fangor National Student Painting Competition, Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (2020).

We barely speak of them and their name escapes us. Philosophy has always overlooked them, more out of contempt than out of neglect. They are the cosmic ornament, the inessential and multicolored accident that reigns in the margins of the cognitive field. The contemporary metropolis views them as superfluous trinkets of urban decoration. Outside the city walls, they are hosts—weeds—or objects of mass production. Plants are the always open wound of the metaphysical snobbery that defines our culture.^[1]

This quote from the introduction to the book The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture by Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia highlights our dual attitude towards plants, depending on the context in which they appear. The same organism can have a completely different status in various cultural or economic spaces. The example of plants classified as weeds serves as the best illustration. Biological sciences do not distinguish this category at all, so assigning a plant to it depends on the circumstances. A weed is not always a weed, and not everywhere. One floral species can simultaneously function as a medicinal plant, a decorative one, or fall into the group of Plantae Malum – “evil plants.”

All the adjectives and phrases used to describe these undesirable organisms come down to one keyword – “wildness,” understood as an extreme, untameable state, excessive fertility, uncontrollable growth. As the Concise Oxford Dictionary suggests, “weed” is a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants.[2] It belongs neither among agricultural crops, nor in manicured parks or gardens, where it nevertheless spreads spontaneously. Forced to adapt to life anywhere, it seizes moments of human inattention or neglect. Even a cursory examination of the behaviour of plants considered as weeds reveals their amazing ability to co-evolve with humans, develop new strategies for survival and growth. They can successfully adjust to any environment, even one that has been deeply changed by intensive farming or industry. Some of them are botanical doppelgangers, mimicking the appearance and growth rate of cultivated crops – their survival thus depends on the difficulty of telling them apart. Their greatest crime is failing to conform to human rules by appearing in places allocated a different function.

Look

Unlike ornamental plants cultivated in gardens, weeds – Plantae Malum – are not supposed to be looked at. They deserve neither the space they take up nor our glance. We avert our eyes from them because they seem unattractive, unwanted and inappropriate. However, by selecting the right method of styling and photographing them, Anna Kędziora forces us to pay attention. She uses the kenzan to arrange the plants into a form known from floristics and allows them to fill in the entire frame. Appropriate lighting and background selection brings out their details – colour, variety, texture, shape. As a result, they turn from worthless waste into tenderly portrayed organisms. Are these artistic gestures enough to make Plantae Malum beautiful (Plantae Pulchrum), and therefore good?

Word

The language of talking about weeds uses dualistic, stigmatising terms and metaphors focusing on the undesirable features of these plants and their relations with other plants and with people. It leads to demonization and consolidates our stereotypical way of thinking about them, unambiguously demonstrating the human fear of losing control and deliberately blocking any ethical reflection on them. Being aware of the power of language to shape our consciousness, Anna Kędziora uses it in a very perverse manner. In the presented recording, she does not reveal the names of the plants featured at the exhibition; instead, she reads out their physical descriptions taken from the atlas of weeds. The detailedness of these entries has a specific function – to enable precise identification and effective elimination of the unwanted specimen. However, the omission of their names results in the creation of a huge entanglement of random words, all the more so since neither the photographs nor the wax prints are labelled. How can we then know what we are actually looking at? Deprived of a clue in the form of a name, we are lost, forced to fall back on our own intuition. The recited words, with a surprisingly large number of diminutives among them, quickly disappear. The woman’s voice makes them sound poetic. Is this the way to talk about weeds?

Wildness

Anna Kędziora makes no attempt to arrange the featured plants into a compact, structured set. Her collection of beeswax prints seems unsystematic and chaotic; sometimes only a fragment of a plants is visible, with the details missing. We have to rely on our memory and imagination not to recognise the plant, but to recall how it would look in a wild meadow. The graphic hybrids, based on botanical drawings of weeds, are the most unruly. In the colonial world, plant hybrids had a special status. Many of them were of significant economic value, demonstrating the effectiveness of innovative breeding methods. In general, no hybrids were created that would be harmful to crops. That is why I perceive Anna Kędziora’s gesture as liberating. Plantae Malum have escaped – from the plant atlas, from ugliness and oblivion, throwing off the shackles of linguistic clichés and definitions. Will they become even a little more noticeable or wanted, will we let them be (themselves)? If not, one more question remains: Is it possible that, as a result of environmental degradation, the plants that are considered weeds today will ever be protected as endangered?

^[1] E. Coccia, The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture, Wiley-Blackwell, 2018, p. 3.

[2] The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th edition, edited by Judy Pearsall, Oxford University Press, 1999.

This spring, the building of Concordia Design Wrocław, a popular meeting place for the inhabitants of Wrocław, will house a temporary, publicly accessible studio of the Wrocław-based artist Kasia Kmita. As part of a project organised by the Krupa Gallery, Kmita will work on a series of portraits of contemporary Wrocław inhabitants created in the traditional papercutting technique.

En face. En trois quart. En pied. Nuptial, collective or self-portraits, showing the model in diverse ways, under various circumstances and with different techniques, are among the oldest types of representational art and a rich source of information about our ancestors – how they lived over the centuries, what interested them and even what diseases plagued them.

Commissioning a famous artist to do a portrait used to be an indicator of status, a visible sign of belonging to a given social class and a means of ensuring immortality. We know famous depictions of rulers, scholars and members of the elite, but also more intimate portraits immortalising people from the artist’s environment – other artists, friends or family members.

In 2020, during the pandemic, Kasia Kmita started a project called Portrait Studio. It was based on the idea that anyone could send her their photo, which Kmita used to make a cut-out portrait and then published on a specially created profile on Instagram.

Today, when the pandemic restrictions are slowly being lifted, the artist can use more traditional methods of working live with a model. The lack of a virtual distance or barrier in the form of a screen glass allows her to get a better look at the model, understand their character and personality.

The project Portrait Studio 2022 will be carried out with the involvement of the residents of Wrocław.

In the Concordia Design Wrocław building on Słodowa Island, a public portrait studio will be arranged for a period of two months, during which Kasia Kmita will create visitors’ portraits. They will include both well-known figures who have rendered great services for the culture of Wrocław, as well as people who applied to participate in the project.

Kasia Kmita often portrays members of her environment: artists, curators, journalists, but also people she meets by chance. Like the old masters of painting, she focuses not only on showing the physical likeness of a given person, but also on capturing their character and the social context in which they function. Kmita presents her models with accompanying attributes, paying special attention to the details of their outfit or manner of being. What emerges as a result is not just the model’s portrait, but a depiction of the times in which they live, the customs and trends that they follow.

The works created as a result of the project Portrait Studio will make up a collective representation of today’s inhabitants of Wrocław, which will reflect the character of the city and its residents. We hope that it will provide our descendants with valuable information about life in Wrocław in the 2020s.

The project will be accompanied by educational activities: workshops for children and adults, curator-led tours and meetings with the artist.

HOW TO TAKE PART IN THE PROJECT

As part of the project, Kasia Kmita does portraits of inhabitants of Wrocław.

We would like to invite you to pose for the artist at her Portrait Studio in the Concordia Design Wrocław building (Wyspa Słodowa 7). The meeting over coffee will last 1–2 hours. During this time, the artist will prepare sketches, which she will later use to create a portrait using the paper cutting technique.

The number of places is limited. If you would like to participate in the project, please send an email to the following address:

anna.stec@krupagallery.pl

The project is accompanied by educational activities: workshops for children and adults, curator-led tours and meetings with the artist.

The studio is open to the public on selected Fridays:

1 April, 8 April, 13 May, 20 May, 27 May, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.

SCHEDULE

2 April 2022 (Saturday), 12–2 p.m. – paper cutting workshops for children / prior registration required

Venue: Concordia Design Wrocław, Wyspa Słodowa 7

8 May 2022 (Sunday), 12–2 p.m. – intergenerational workshop on portrait drawing / prior registration required

Venue: Concordia Design Wrocław, Wyspa Słodowa 7

14 May 2022 (Saturday), 7.00 p.m. – 9.00 p.m. – guided tours for the audience and meeting with the artist

Venue: Concordia Design Wrocław, Wyspa Słodowa 7

05.06.2022 (Sunday), godz. 4 – 6PM – studio visit and meeting with the artist
Venue: Concordia Design Wrocław, Wyspa Słodowa 7

KASIA KMITA

Kasia Kmita (b. 1972) studied at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. In 1996 she received a diploma in painting.

In her practice Kmita primarily uses a meticulously refined form of traditional papercutting. Her works often contain insights about the latest trends, lifestyles and everyday life in the city, including relatively new urban traditions that have already taken root in our culture. She carefully observes changes in society, analyses the desires and mechanisms governing human behaviour. By combining elements of Polish folklore with pop culture symbols, Kasia Kmita’s work create a colourful portrait of contemporary times.

She lives and works in Wrocław.

http://kasiakmita.com/

CONCORDIA DESIGN

Concordia Design Wrocław is a centre of creativity and business. It is a business hub for young entrepreneurs with a programme of cultural events as well as a bar and a restaurant. It has a rich educational (meetings, discussions) and artistic offer (exhibitions and concerts). The events organised in Concordia are intended to encourage social participation of various groups of inhabitants.

Contemporary virtual reality and the creeping merger of technology and our bodies seem to define the future of the human species in an unprecedented way. By offering the promise of a life free from biological, spatial and temporal constraints, they materialise old millenarian ideas and the primordial desire to achieve immortality.

The exhibition focuses on the attempt to overcome death as the main vector of futurological concepts of humanity. While referring to contemporary transhumanism, Russian cosmism and ancient roots, it tells the story of the last people.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the defence of the artist’s doctoral dissertation.

Paweł Baśnik (b. 1992) is a co-founder of the Bezimienny painting collective, the Church of Nihilists – a para-religious art group and gallery, and the Przemijam magazine. He has graduated from the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture of the E. Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. In his practice he refers to mortuary issues and historical and psychological motives. His latest works raise topics connected with transhumanist notions of immortality, including their mythological and religious roots, posing questions about the origins and limits of civilisational progress. He lives and works in Wrocław.

❞ The armed ranks come together in an amorous embrace. Cupid’s arrows pierce bucklers and hearts. The forces of love triumph while the sweet furries clash with the muscular Cubs in light split armor. Shouts of armies of protective spirits whiz in the air❞ .

Today’s games are mostly about competition. Discord is typically encapsulated by struggle, battle and violence. War.
At the root of the exhibition is a passion shared by both artists – miniature wargames.
Warhammer is a series of games in which fantasy armies fight countless battles in an endless, eternal war. Different factions, armies and fantastic creatures, races and monsters, clash on epic battlefields. In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war^[1].

This dark world, whose essence is combat, has developed its characteristic aesthetics, based on an array of weapons, muscles, claws and broadly understood violence – exaggerated, aestheticised and conventionalised. At the same time, it freely draws on various historical references. Over time, the Warhammer universe grew to include books, films and computer games describing subsequent alliances and stages of the conflict. It has become a cultural phenomenon and an emblem of one of the aspects of popular culture.

While advocating equality, freedom and feminism, two young artists, Jan Możdżyński and Sebastian Sebulec, queer this world by turning war into a battle of love. They create their alternative miniature armies – guardian armies, which at the LoveHammer exhibition are presented through the prism of love. Instead of fighting to the death, they are fighting a different battle. The artists thus question the stereotypical order of the “boyish” game, expressed through brute force and culminating in war and violence

This alternative vision of discord and battle reverses its order. Cubs and Mutts in Love meet in a non-antagonistic fight.

The armies

Jan Możdżyński
Crumblings

I started my Warhammer collection with the army of Necrons – cosmic “mummies.” Centuries ago, as a result of internal wars, the soul of their ancient ruler disintegrated into millions of miniscule particles. Similarly, the figurines in my works – they are parts of me. They are my personal army of moods, attitudes, thoughts and infatuations. Despite their rough appearance, these are fragile creatures. They often originate from crude 3D models from computer games from the turn of the century – the time of my childhood. I am still quite naive in my perception of the world, which is why my warriors of love fight with tenderness, curiosity and boastfulness with a tinge of jealousy.
I like them because they are lonely and nobody looks after them. But maybe that will change soon.

vs.

Sebulec
Mutts in Love

Mutts in Love are at it again!

These seemingly harmless cuties know tricks that will raise your bloodpressure and awaken butterflies in your stomach… They lure their victims with voluptuous shapes and a hypnotic dance, while their sweet eyes pierce right through to see the hidden longings of your soul. Their claws are dripping with liquid desire – one scratch will make it impossible for you to stop thinking about them. But poisoned arrows are their most dangerous weapon; woe to those who are hit.
However, their weapons of choice can be treacherous and unpredictable… Perhaps the powers they have managed to tame will get out of hand and lead to their undoing?

–

The battle playing out in the biggest window of Krupa Gallery’s seat is accompanied by a codex – a publication that usually accompanies wargames, presenting the fighting characters and units, their special skills and attacks, methods of fighting. The publication is available as a pdf file to be downloaded from the Gallery’s website.

Jan Możdżyński lives and works in Warsaw, where in 2018 he graduated from the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts.
In his artistic practice raises topics connected with gender, gender iden-tity, and stigmatisation due to sexual preferences. His works show the relationship between feminism and the rights of sexual minorities. He refers to BDSM fetishes and related items, depicts role-playing situations, disintegrating the traditional understanding of masculinity and feminini-ty. He is interested in the mechanisms of repressive patriarchy.
He is an active participant in the BDSM community. He practices boxing and conducts boxing classes for friends.

Sebulec studied Animated Film at the Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He works with 3D graphics, animation, and game engines; he pays particular attention to the figures of virtual companions, avatars, and guides. He is also inspired by the culture and aesthetics of online fandoms.

[1] from the cover of a rulebook for one of the Warhammer variants (Warhammer 40,000. Rogue Trader, RPG)

Press:

Wiktoria Wojciechowska’s Sparks is an interdisciplinary project portraying the war in Donbas. Created between winter 2014 and summer 2016 the project is centered around a series of portraits of young, regular people, coming from different backgrounds, who had to leave their lives and go to the frontline, become soldiers of war. The project is a polyphonic image comprised of photography, video, collages and stories. The artist has also included both her own material and sources provided by the soldiers and civilians, in her work. Subsequent series of works in the exhibition create an image of personal experience of a human faced with terrors of war, as well as personal and collective memory.

Sparks, presented in numerous exhibitions around the world, were mediating the conflict and the personal experience of the people involved in it, around the world. It has advocated the regular people’s suffering and trauma gained in the effect of this tragic war, to the international audiences and public opinion. Yet, it has never been presented in the Ukraine, to the people who took part in it and shared their personal stories. The exhibition at Lviv Art Center is the first public presentation of the Sparks in the Ukraine, an occasion to fill this gap and thank the participants for their generous involvement.

Seven years have passed since the project started and both the war and the portrayed soldiers are in a different place and situation in their lives. Having come back from the frontline they had to find themselves in civilian, everyday life. The exhibition at Lviv Art Center aims to underline the aftermath of the fighting experience in the lives of those who had to take the arms. The public programme will include not only artistic discussions and guided tours, but also events focused at the mental condition and psychological cost paid by the former soldiers.

The exhibition is a cooperation project between Lviv Art Center from the Ukraine and Krupa Gallery from Poland.

Wiktoria Wojciechowska (b. 1991) lives in Paris and Lublin, works across photography, film, collage and sculpture. Her works refer to current events portraying society and individuals. Her practices are particularly focused on observation and understanding of human lives and stories through the rules of society and history. The projects are characterized by fragmentariness and non-linearity based on shreds of conversations, images, rituals and collected items.

Sparks completed between 2014 and 2016 received several international awards, including at the Festival Rencontres d’Arles 2018: Prix Madame Figaro and Public Choice Discovery Award. Work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, such as: Jimei X Arles festival, Xiamen, China; Krakow Photomonth, Poland; Museum of Photography in Riga, Latvia; Exhibition Bureau in Warsaw, Poland; Villa Perochon, Niort, France; La Filature, Mulhouse, France; MUCEM, Marseille, France; Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon.

Wiktoria Wojciechowska’s works are part of public and private collections, i.a. Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Grenoble Museum; Festival Rencontres de la photographie, Arles; Fondation François Schneider, Wattwiller; Fondation des Treilles, Paris; Polish Modern Art Foundation, Warsaw. Recently she was part of the Trouble in Paradise PROLOG+1 project for the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Architettura 2021, Italy.

PUBLIC PROGRAMME

18.11.2021

4 pm
Press preview

18.11.2021

6 pm
Exhibition opening

19.11.2021

4 pm
Artist’s guided tour of the exhibition 

7 pm
Panel discussion: Aftermath of being a solider

The war in Donbas, which is still carried on, has already been a disastrous experience for a large number of people, especially those who had to join the army. Changing one’s life and identification, from an engineer, show assistant of dj to a soldier, getting accustomed to the horrors of was, surviving the frontline, and than back to a civilian, living a regular life, cannot come without a cost. If it is possible at all. And this effect has risen to be an experience of a generation.
Those problems seem not to be addressed and present enough in the public debate. The panel with experts and ex-soldiers is aimed at discussing the visibility of problems and mental harm made by war. 

The discussion will be held at Lviv Art Center as well as live streamed over Youtube. Submitting questions online will be available.

participants:

moderator: Pavlo Kovach

Roksolana Fedets

Levytskyi Maksym

Bura Daria

27.11 .2021

4pm
exhibition guided tour with the curator

2.12.2021

7:30pm
Mental health support infopoint

An open meeting. Roksolana Fedets, an expert in psychological support and therapy for people who have experienced trauma, will be providing basic information, for any interested persons, about the aftermath of the war in the mental health of the soliders.
Everyone is welcome to join, both soldiers and other people, interested in the symptoms, looking for ways to find support for themselves or their friends, having questions or wishing find a person to talk about those issues. 

The meeting is open and free. 

4.12.2021

4pm
exhibition guided tour with the curator

11.12.2021

4pm
exhibition guided tour with the curator

Press:

The Krupa Gallery is pleased to invite you to the Winter Stage – christmas art and publications shop, which will be held on Bulwar Staromiejski in Wrocław at the weekend of 18-19 December 2021. During the event, it will be possible to see and purchase works by young Wrocław artists and artists associated with the Krupa Gallery.

The Winter Stage will feature works by students of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wrocław (associated with Studio 112 run by Dr Anna Kołodziejczyk). The Papier w Dole publishing house will present a catalogue of its publications.

If you are looking for an original gift for your loved ones or for yourself, or if you simply want to see works by young artists from Wrocław and other places – come and visit us!

❆ ❆ ❆

The initiatives carried out by the Krupa Gallery are intended to promote and popularise contemporary art. We would like to encourage the inhabitants of Wrocław to actively support the work and development of artists, promote the idea of collecting art and help future collectors take their first steps on the art market.

❆ ❆ ❆

participants:

Krupa Gallery

Students of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Wrocław (students of Studio 112 run by Dr Anna Kołodziejczyk)

Papier w Dole publishing house

BWA Wrocław (publications)

OP ENHEIM (publications and merchandising Slavs and Tatars)

In the TV jargon, “cliffhanger” describes a narrative device that consists in ending an episode (or the whole season) of a TV series at the most intense proliferation of ultra-dramatic plots. In this way, the series gets suspended at a metaphorical cliff, aiming to generate among the audience a mix of curiosity and frustration that will coerce them to watching on. Effective and campy cliffhangers largely contributed to the massive popularity of Dynasty, a TV show produced throughout the 1980s in the US. Its cliffhangers played a role akin to sentence punctuation, informing the rhythm and pace of the storytelling. In such episode endings, the characters are often on the verge of tragic death, falling or being pushed down sets of stairs and off the balconies ill-secured by wobbly railing. Some succumb to car and horse accidents, always plagued by hefty showers and thunderous storms. Others get trapped in a building that a masked avenger sets fire to, or they fall victim to a mass shooting, instigated by political rebels, during a church-wedding ceremony. Characters once considered dead return to the living, towards whom they ache with murderous desire, and each incidental encounter turns out to be, sooner or later, a heavily plotted situation with a double, if not triple, entendre.

Dynasty was a massive pop-cultural phenomenon, also in Poland. The series, broadcast on public TV in the early-1990s, i.e. during the tumultous systemic transformation, oozed with the mirage of neoliberal opulence and success. Its protagonists, centered around two oil mogul families – the Carringtons and the Colbys – lived exuberantly wealthy lives: they wandered, from room to room, in luxurious interios, gobbled on caviar, and flew private planes whenever and wherever they found fit. At the same time, their lives were filled with an endless stream of shenanigans and trouble, which, week by week, forced them to face the forces threatening their wealth and lives (usually in that order). Łukasz Stokłosa’s multi-medial exhibition is a nostalgic-hauntologic afterimage of the luxurious world of Dynasty. Some of the works are video installations that loop short fragments of the selected cliffhangers and are scored by a cacophony of heavily compressed sound samples of the series’ original soundtrack. The glitchy aesthetics of these works may evoke an experience of watching Dynasty at a CRT TV set, with its characteristic pale-blue sheen and technological glitches. A similarly elliptic strategy of referencing the storylines of the series also characterizes most of the paintings, which present objects, such as tableware or set design elements, sometimes sharp, at other times, like in a dreamy recollection, blurry and pouring with bright stains over a murky background. Their causal relation with Dynasty’s specific plots and their chronology is veiled and uncertain, as if distilled out of the dramatic tension that underlies cliffhangers. These paintings are counterpointed by a few portraits referencing the production backstories that used the replacements of actors and actresses as a fuel to concocting implausible plots. Stokłosa’s exhibition gestures towards what, in the “here and now,” remains of Dynasty, together with its exciting and violent narrative malaise, coloring the images of opulence from the era when the promise of a bright capitalist was still treated with seriousness

Sorry, this entry is only available in Polish.

Jacek Fota’s photographs present views from the tram window, such as: mediative images of the fields on the city border, people standing by a kiosk, young men chatting in a muddy parking lot. The ordinariness of these sights is comforting – they are evidence of an ongoing life and of a flowing time. The seasons change, the life cycle closes and reopens. The selection of the photographs presented at the exhibition is determined by the concept of peace and meditation, of taming reality, of focusing on looking at the image, wandering freely through the details of photographs and its colors, and the structure contained in the image.

However, the Window Views exhibition occurs not only in looking at the photos, in which the banality takes on weight and intensity. The place of presentation and the way the photographs are presented are the successive planes on which the narrative of the exhibition unfolds. Suspended between functions, the space is temporarily appropriated by the exhibition and photographs – while at the same time fulfilling the classic requirements of a white cube. Once again, we are on the verge – in the space of a wasteland that makes sense.

There Used to Be Such a Park, They Called it Jungle Gym

Oak-hornbeam forests, riparian forests and other forested areas, gardens, parks, yards, terraces, balconies, greenhouses, promenades, pergolas… The green landscape of Wrocław has been formed over the centuries, as evidenced by notes and documents such as drawings, paintings or texts. It was already mentioned in Renaissance literature, in which Silesia was called Elysium – the Paradise Garden.

Throughout the centuries, the gardens of Wrocław performed various functions. In the Middle Ages, they served monks as places of contemplation due to their symbolism, but also fulfilled purely utilitarian functions, enabling them to cultivate edible and medicinal plants. In the Renaissance, gardens were supposed to express the harmony of the world as well as perform educational and scientific roles – this is when the first hortus botanicus appeared in Wrocław. In subsequent centuries, gardens became recreational salons and arenas of social life. This is why the aesthetics of gardens gained special importance, often supplemented with an element of surprise, particularly in the Baroque and Mannerism (as opposed to the harmonious planning of Renaissance gardens). In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, parks and public garden were primarily used as recreational areas, sometimes as amusement parks, enabling the inhabitants of overcrowded cities to take a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Many forms of Wrocław’s greenery and gardens have not survived to our times. Among them was the Renaissance Rybisch Garden, stretching from the present Ofiar Oświęcimskich street up to the City Moat, whose architectural layout referred to the ancient Roman villa urbana, or the numerous établissement, also known as Gardens of Delight, which served the role of entertainment complexes. All that has survived is some architectural elements, but the gardens, greenhouses and palm houses are all but gone.

It is hard to fathom today that Wrocław gardens used to be internationally famous. The garden of Dr. Laurentius Scholtz von Rosenau, established in 1587 between today’s Piotra Skargi and Wierzbowa streets, was dubbed the paradise of Wrocław and described in Renaissance literature as locus amoenus (pleasant place). It boasted 340 genera of plants, including medicinal and exotic plants, such as oranges, figs, tobacco, as well as some complete novelties of those times: potatoes, tomatoes and tulips. The garden-salon was famous all over Europe because it was the venue for sumptuous parties for the elite, e.g. Floralia Wratislaviensia, modelled on the ancient festival in honour of the Roman goddess Flora. Its greatest attractions included an artificial stone grotto, a pyramid-shaped bird cage, an Egyptian mummy placed in a cabinet of curiosities or works of art, for example Lucretia by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The owner published catalogues of the cultivated plants and made sure that his garden appeared in works of poetry and graphic art, which is why its legend has survived to this day.
In the 17^th century, the complex was transformed by Wolfgang Scharschmidt into the Water Garden – probably the most eccentric garden layout in Wrocław. The visitors were surprised by numerous water installations and plumbing devices designed by the owner himself. Supposedly, there was a warning at the entrance: “If you do not wish to get sprayed, be careful, because one misstep will make you wet right behind this door.” Water, beer and wine gushed out of the bizarre sculptures and taps in the stone grotto.

Where is Lucretia

The richness of forms and functions of Silesian gardens continues to stimulate imagination. The latest series of paintings by Wrocław-based artist Monika Konieczna is inspired by the history of local greenery. Her growing fascination with nature has resulted, among other things, from the recent experience of the pandemic, when freedom of being in nature was restricted and the lack of contact with it was felt even more acutely. As the artist explains, what comes to the fore in her paintings from the Locus Amoenus series is “the need to return to nature, to a paradise lost, perhaps to myself.”

The works contain a number of references to the history of art and literature. Of particular importance is the tree archetype, present in our collective unconscious for centuries as a symbol of life and death, rebirth, a link between earth and heaven, a celestial pole (axis mundi). The artist dedicates subsequent paintings to actual trees. Her large-format canvases as well as small sketches depict the silhouettes of Wrocław’s natural monuments: the Guide Oak at Sucha Street, the plane tree by the Holy Trinity Nursing Home, or the tulip trees from the South Park.
Naturally, the subject of the paintings is connected with the eponymous “pleasant place.”
The literary topos of locus amoenus appeared already in ancient times, and its image is deeply rooted in the history of painting. Literary works clearly specify which elements constitute the idyllic pleasant place. Whether in ancient Arcadia, the mythological Elysium or the biblical Eden, trees, grass and water are always there, testifying to the beauty of the place and creating a safe haven.
All these elements can also be found in the paintings by Konieczna, who considers nature to be her hideout and safe place. Nature appears here primarily as a fantastic and dynamic phenomenon. Konieczna’s paintings are far from the ordered landscapes by Lorrain or Poussain. The artist juxtaposes elements of the authentic, natural landscape of Wrocław with surreal images of non-existent city gardens. Exotic animals lurk from the lush vegetation: the fleshy silhouette of a lion, painted with a thick layer of paint, emerges from the so-called Kilimanjaro hill in Wrocław ( Wedding Night); a monkey is looking at us from the oak on Sucha Street. In this sense, the subject of Konieczna’s paintings is probably closer to the category of “imagined landscape,” while the colour palette and the manner of painting trigger associations with the emotional painting of post-impressionists and Fauvists.

If No Bird Makes a Nest, We Will Be Able to Visit the Tree Crown

It is worth noting that the Locus Amoenus series was largely created en plein air. Smaller works were created outdoors, while larger paintings were done in the studio on the basis of sketches made in nature. The decision to paint in nature influences the expressiveness and composition of the works – the canvas becomes a place of bold painting gestures. The artist rejects the photographic way of looking at wildlife and thus shortens the distance between the viewer and nature, which in recent times has been viewed mostly through the camera lens. The fact that the paintings were done at the turn of the year allowed Konieczna to closely observe nature in its various transitional states: streaks of paint running down the canvas make the branches of a dry tree literally melt away (Area for Rent for a Warehouse or Other Services), while the crown of the Guide Oak in full bloom resembles an atmospheric phenomenon, shining against the blurred architectural elements.
While working on the project, Konieczna used large canvases and a panoramic composition (a format that was patented by Robert Barker to fully reflect the beauty of the natural landscape before it was widely used by painters of historical and battle scenes), and a method of combining canvases (allowing the artist to work outdoors on individual parts of the picture, despite the large scale; to avoid going back far in the history of art, suffice it to recall Hockney’s ways of working on landscapes from the early 2000s).

For Konieczna, Pleasant Place was an opportunity to return not only to nature, but also to traditional arts. Although the artist graduated in Painting, she devoted a significant part of her practice to performance. Irrespective of the field, however, all her artistic activities are extremely coherent. The theme of nature has permeated her practice since she was a student; her performances are as colourful and painterly as her paintings, while the paintings are just as vivid and emotive as her performances.

Land for Rent for a Warehouse or Other Services

The works from the Locus Amoenus series invite the viewer to experience the spectacle of nature and observe the tensions at the intersection of nature, architecture and man. They rekindle our imagination of nonexistent urban gardens and reawaken our longing for green enclaves in the concrete cityscape.

The series of Monika Konieczna’s latest paintings is accompanied by a film documenting her outdoor work. In one of the shots, we see the artist in an uninteresting setting typical of many Polish cities – in a small square next to a busy petrol station. It is hard not to be surprised that this place could have become an inspiration for a lush, colourful landscape.
As we know (mainly thanks to art) – looking is not always the same as seeing.

*the subtitles in the text were borrowed from the titles of paintings from the Locus Amoenus series

Text: Anna Stec

Monika Konieczna

Born in Wrocław in 1978. Painter and performer, graduate of and lecturer in the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław.
In her creative practice she draws on myths, archetypes and rituals, approaching them in a new, uniquely individual order, referring to what is common through the personal.
She is interested in the memory of place as well as individual and collective memory. Since her studies at the Academy, the motif of nature and the related cycle of life and death have constituted important threads in her artistic work.
Her artistic statements are made using visual installations in space, performance, collage.
She lives and works in Wrocław.

monikakonieczna.weebly.com

 

Created under the City of Wrocław scholarship programme.

Check out the courtyard of ul. Ruska 46 for a special project of the Art Scene of the 21st New Horizons International Film Festival. The Midnight Show is an exhibition-screening that starts punctually at midnight and ends at 1:00 AM, only to start again the next evening.

This is the fifth edition of the Midnight Show (the previous ones took place in 2013–2016) prepared by BWA Wrocław during the New Horizons festival. For nine evenings, exhibition screenings will begin when the last film screenings in the theaters end. The medium of this year’s edition is neon – a means of expression deeply rooted both in the cinematographic iconography and in the urban space creating the scenery of nightlife.

Midnight Show V: More Light! consists of two premiere productions designed by Monika Drożyńska and Michał Frydrych, which will see the light… of night in a neon-lit backyard located on ul. Ruska 46. This is where the outdoor Neon Side Gallery is located, displaying a large collection of historical Wrocław neon signs. Starting at midnight (for an hour) all the neons will be turned off and give way to the Midnight Show, composed of two neon installations. So, it can be said that it spans between turning the lights on and off, between the figures of knowledge and mystery, between enlightenment and its antithesis – entering the darkness, and also (in cinematographic language) between the opening and final credits, because the end of each performance is always an introduction to the next.

Neon leads us towards the landscape of modernity, pop culture, advertising and the society of the spectacle. It seduces with its decorative qualities and an appetizingly artificial aura. It is an urban mirage – and, at the same time, it has the potential of a persuasive message. It is related to cinema, which also oscillates between waking up and awakening the public to participate in public debates. We would like to emphasize this dual nature of the medium during the Midnight Show.

A neon show, like a film screening, needs darkness that it can illuminate. Following this path, we refer to the concept of enlightenment, with our title recalling the final words of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “More light!” We repeat them at a time when the ideas of the Enlightenment, i.e., the conviction of reason’s privileged role in the cognitive processes or in societal organization and political discourse, sway under the pressure of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and alternative facts. The victory of light is neither inevitable nor unequivocal – nor is the figure of Goethe, a man of the Enlightenment and at the same time a precursor of Romanticism. Even his final message is inscribed with ambivalence: the poet uttered these words on his deathbed, walking into the darkness. Some even say that he did not say “mehr Licht!” [more light] but “mehr nicht” [more nothing].

Held in the context of the festival, the Midnight Show was created as a platform for dialogue between the exhibition medium and the parameters that define the cinematographic experience. Editing, dramaturgy, sequence of events, projection, light, darkness and time are some of the tools and figures that we borrow from the world of cinematography to involve them in creating an exhibition-as-screening, film-without-film with artifacts starring in the leading roles. The fifth edition takes place between the flashback formula and the project sequel.

That moment when you haggle with reality – you wish it were different, but it isn’t. But what if you really tried? Bought some cryptocurrency, joined a pyramid scheme, started to sell a miracle diet?

Attempts to overcome the confines of reality can take various forms. Sometimes we look for mental shortcuts, such as manifestation, positive or wishful thinking. In search of a miracle, we are tempted to ask for divine help, learn secret knowledge, sign a pact with a metaphysical force or being, which is usually burdened with serious risks. Dealing with the devil has tragic consequences – the price is higher than the benefits, and the ultimate loss is part of the story.

The works by Veronika Hapchenko, Paweł Olszewski and Alicja Pakosz illustrate a fascination with these desperate attempts to take shortcuts: everyday clashes of dreams with reality, small personal dramas, tempting illusions, projections of fantasies, quasi-theories and the existence of symbolic systems and occult movements in a seemingly rational world.
A reference to the vivid quote from Frank Herbert’s Dune in the title invokes the popular wisdom that warns against believing in silver bullets.

In a series of small paintings, which are typical of her everyday artistic practice, Alicja Pakosz uses pareidolia – a mental phenomenon that compels us to see familiar objects in random shapes. She illustrates attempts to enter into a private dialogue with reality by perceiving objective, random states of affairs as deliberate actions subject to negotiation and moral evaluation, as if interacting with another person or being. It is like trying to argue with the facts, which only makes matters worse for the arguer. As assumed by the artist, individual works making up the series can be subjectively interpreted by the viewer, but there is also a story behind each of them.

Extraordinary events and twists of fate often became part of popular culture and folk legends as manifestations of the Evil One. Otherwise, something like this could not have happened, could it?
Dealing with the devil is sometimes akin to autosuggestion. After all, we never know whether the pact has actually been concluded. Perhaps this is why it used to be so important to sign it with blood? Entering into deals with “evil forces” usually entails a disproportionately high price – a punishment for a moment of (promised) power or overcoming adversities in mortal life.

Veronika Hapchenko’s works come from her graduation series devoted to occult practices in the USSR: From Helena Blavatsky, a populariser of this kind of esoteric practices in Tsarist Russia in the second half of the 19th century, to the partially confirmed influence of occult practices on USSR dignitaries and attempts to use these movements in international diplomacy, to Trotsky’s private bodyguard known as Red Devil, who was wounded over thirty times and always returned to service.

Paweł Olszewski looks for simple expectations and dreams confronted with information noise and a multi-level language of communication. Overstimulation, or the effort put into weeding out fake contents, can result in a peculiar delirium in which facts are barely distinguishable from projection, and that which is obvious becomes an unattainable dream.

curator: Antoni Burzyński

artists:

Alicja Pakosz
Born in Tychy in 1996. She lives and works in Krakow. A graduate of the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow in the studio of Prof. Andrzej Bednarczyk. In 2018/2019 she studied at Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg as part of the Erasmus + programme.

Paweł Olszewski
Born in Tarnów in 1996. He studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, in the Painting Studio of Prof. Andrzej Bednarczyk and the Interdisciplinary Studio of Grzegorz Sztwiertnia and Zbigniew Sałaj, and at the Universität der Künste Berlin in the studio of Prof. Ina Weber as part of an international exchange programme. He works with painting, installation and objects.

Veronika Hapchenko
Born in Kiev in 1995. From 2013, she studied Stage Design at the National University of Cinema and Television in Kiev. In 2015, she began studies at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, in the Painting Studio of Prof. Andrzej Bednarczyk and the Video and Photography Studio of Prof. Grzegorz Sztwiertnia and Prof. Zbigniew Sałaj. In 2019, as part of a student exchange programme, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the Post-conceptual Art Studio of Prof. Marina Grzinic.
At the moment I’m focused on researching the origins of the October Revolution and the esoteric and occult groups and motifs revived at the time, which had a significant impact on the revolutionists, artists, theatre directors, writers and poets. This taboo topic reveals the probable events and activities of people directly involved in the events of 1917.

“If Wishes…”

KubaParis
https://kubaparis.com/if-wishes-were-fishes-wed-all-cast-nets/

Tzvetnik
https://tzvetnik.online/article/if-wishes-were-fishes-we-d-all-cast-nets-group-show-at-krupa-gallery-wroclaw

Saliva.live
https://www.instagram.com/p/CT6tvmTInYb/

The Krupa Gallery Summer Stage is a series of exhibitions and accompanying cultural events held during the holiday season in the gallery’s temporary seat on the Old Town Boulevard in Wrocław. The programme focuses on the presentation of young artists and new, interesting phenomena in art.

The project emerged out of the desire and need to look for solutions that would promote and popularise contemporary art and actively support artists’ work and development. The purpose of the initiative is also to promote cooperation between the private sector and the field of culture and art.

The Krupa Gallery Summer Stage is organised in cooperation with the Makima Group. Selected works featured at the exhibitions will be purchased for the Krupa Gallery Foundation collection.

EXHIBITIONS:

9.07 – 22.08. 2021
Veronika Hapchenko, Paweł Olszewski, Alicja Pakosz
If Wishes Were Like Fish, Everyone Would Put Nets
Curator: Antoni Burzyński

24.07 -22.08.2021
Monika Konieczna
Locus Amoenus (Pleasant Place)
Curator: Anna Stec

September 2021
TIFF Festival

Krupa Gallery – 04.06-25.06
Plac Jana Pawła II 14, 50-043 Wrocław

The Polish title of the exhibition, Przyjemność Obcowania, translates directly to The Pleasure of Experiencing. Pleasure derives from the Polish word which means to take in, to receive, whereas experience has much to do with being present. Therefore, the pleasure of experiencing, whether it is in art or sex, has much to do with being present and being able to receive. There is something intimate and simultaneously ambiguous in the process – experiencing pleasure requires bringing something in, allowing something to take place inside of us, but also carries the risk of reaction, opening up to an unknown feeling or impulse – something distinctive for both art and sexual pleasure. Art and pleasure both rely strongly on relation, touch, sensuality, letting the recipient see and feel something personal and often mysterious, which derives from the imagination of the creator. Finally, it entails reciprocity. To a certain extent, art and pleasure are much alike.

We present a journal of pleasure perceived differently by seventeen contemporary Polish artists. Pleasure in different forms, shapes and sizes, seen in the context of voyeurism, exhibitionism, fetishism, the body, emotions, magic, nature. Presented works often reflect intimate, private experiences, but also demonstrate pleasure experienced in public, online – accessible pleasure. Being naked and nudity. Demanding pleasure and shy attempts to find it in an intimate relationship, with someone or with ourselves. Pleasure approached with caution, spontaneity or maturity. Pleasure received or pleasure given.

This vast idea became an opportunity to build a testimony of pleasure in its full spectrum of emotions, relations and contexts. It was our conscious choice to gather diverse, often contrasting works – together, they spark a new, stimulating chance to talk about sensuality and sexuality and, in consequence, to talk about sexual education. A chance much needed in Polish public discourse these days.

Everyone has the right to pleasure. It is conveyed in The Declaration of Sexual Rights. Without pleasure, we struggle to go through the day, it is impossible to endure times of crisis. Pleasure is a substantial element of our wellbeing, a crucial part of our physical and spiritual life and, as a result, one of the most natural ways to find happiness. That is why it is an essential part of sexual education and the heart of this exhibition.

Artists:

Adam Adach, Zuzanna Bartoszek, Przemek Branas, Martyna Czech, Pola Dwurnik, Teresa Gierzyńska, Aneta Grzeszykowska i Jan Smaga, Krzysztof Jung, Magdalena Karpińska, Katarzyna Korzeniecka, Róża Litwa, Marta Nadolle, Karol Radziszewski, Jadwiga Sawicka, Mikołaj Sobczak, Łukasz Stokłosa, Konrad Żukowski

Katowice, Galeria Szara – 07.05-28.05
ul. Misjonarzy Oblatów MN 4, 40-129 Katowice

Wrocław, Krupa Gallery – 04.06-25.06
Plac Jana Pawła II 14, 50-043 Wrocław

Smell is one of the most primal senses – it recognises the chemical composition of the environment, of what objects in our vicinity physically consist of. Having been pushed to the background by visual culture, it is still associated with the most intimate experiences. It evokes strong and direct associations, although they are often a bit blurred – our language used to describe olfactory sensations is much poorer than that of the visible things.

The Spot is a small, cosy place in which this intimate experience comes to the fore. It is a closed fragment of space, accessible by the internet, which could be called the home of virtual fragrances – an interior that exudes the atmosphere of peace and ritual.

The Spot is called an online experience because it is a digital work that could be potentially used through several digital media. It is available on a website that can be accessed through the browser of a computer or mobile phone; in the future, it will be possible to see it in VR goggles. However, these seemingly diverse media do not affect the meaning of this work.

Experiencing The Spot via the internet problematises the conventionality and illustrativeness of virtual spaces, which are often even called worlds. In this sense, The Spot is an illustration presenting that which is unattainable by means of something that is at hand. It triggers something akin to a reaction to a smell, although it does not use this sense in any way. It is an animation projected onto an object, which makes us believe that it is about olfactory experiences.

Despite the promises, immersion in virtual experiences has not yet surpassed the conventional theatre contract, which requires the viewer to pretend to be convinced by the illusion on stage.

Smell is not a means of interaction in virtual reality yet (notwithstanding the difficulty of conveying it to the user). All we can do is change the position of objects in a simulated space.

The default nose does not react to smell, but to the position of the object, which in this case is the drawing of the incense. If it was replaced with an image of a burning branch, with the character’s hands moving to and away from it, we would have the impression of reacting to “heat.” The Spot illustrates and reveals this problem.

However, does it bother us when contemplating this place? Does it break the impression of being concentrated on one sense, on a mysterious combination of body and peace? Perhaps not. It depends solely on our decision and the extent to which we are prepared to accept the convention.

thespot.piotrkopik.com

Piotr Kopik
Multimedia artist working in installation, video, machinima, animation, VR and performances, as well as painting and drawing. Graduate of the Faculty of Painting Department at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (diploma completed in the studio of Professor Jaroslaw Modzelewski). Co-founder of the szu szu group. He has exhibited (i.a.) at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, BWA Wrocław, Museum of Art in Lodz, BWA Zielona Gora, Wyspa Art Institute in Gdansk, Austrian Cultural Forum in Warsaw, Kunsthaus Dresden, Bat-Yam International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism in Bat-Yam, rotor in Graz, Lokal_30 Gallery in Warsaw. His films have been shown (i.a.) at FILE in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Planete+ Doc Film Festival, Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, at the Muranow Cinema in Warsaw and the TVP Kultura television station. Artist in Residence stipendist (Progr, Berno). Reciepient of the Mloda Polska (Young Poland) scholarship program. He runs the 3D & Virtual Occurrences Studio I at the Faculty of Media Art at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Lives and works in Warsaw.

http://piotrkopik.com/
https://culture.pl/pl/tworca/piotr-kopik

and–akter. rehearsals of escape
an online-participatory performance by Hanna Wildow, Alva Willemark and Tony Karlsson Savci

date: March 13th, 2021, The Virtual Canvas Project (Krupa Gallery) / world wide web
time: 5.30 pm, GMT+1 (Sweden)
60 minutes, zoom

pre-registration is necessary:
https://docs.google.com/…/1FAIpQLSeqrDXXg96O9R…/viewform

You are invited into a breathing, humming pine forest called Gränseskogen.
A reservoir of unspoilt trees in the deepness of a rural Swedish mountain chain.
Voices offer you proposals for how to orient your lungs.
An ambient landscape lulling you through eight acts of bodyings, feelings, breathings, languagings, voicings, borderings, rootings and deathinings.
and–akter imagines other ways of being together; a sphere for moving air between one body and another, for making sounds, and listening.
For everyone with a breathing body.
——————————————–
and–akter. hosts a limited number of participants, thus pre-registration is necessary and you are kindly asked to only register if you can participate in the entire performance (45 minutes + 15 minutes of introduction). You will need a computer or a screening device, an internet connection and an image of a forest. The performance can be taken part from wherever you are. Further information and instructions will be sent out upon registration.
——————————————–
“and–akter. rehearsals of escape” is a shared work by Hanna Wildow, Alva Willemark and Tony Karlsson Savci, made together with Johan Wahlberg (sounds), Adam Nilsson (DOP), and Litia Perta (wording council). Live technical assistance by Dick Hedlund and Erik Malmsten, graphic guidance by Moa Edlund, breath and movement counseling by Sara Haylett-Utberg.
“and–akter. rehearsals of escape” is presented as a series of iterations and propagations. The first iteration was shown at Galleri BOX (Gothenburg) in August 2020, The Virtual Canvas Project (Krupa Gallery, Poland) presents the second iteration in March 2021, and in May 2021 the third will be presented by Rah Residency (Tehran). In September 2021, and–akter will premier as an IRL-performance at Weld (Stockholm), and in October 2021 the sculptural elongation det är ett rop på hjälp (it is a cry for help) opens at Eldhunden (Stockholm), followed by another performance iteration at Galleri Verkligheten (Umeå) in November 2021.

With support by The Swedish Arts Grants Committeé, Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation and in cooperation with KULTURENS. Special thanks to Hackås Maskin och Kultur, Elektronmusikstudion EMS, Mats Erlandsson, Eric Danger Österlin, Ashik Zaman, Alida Ivanov, Anna Koch, Megan Black, Anna Stec, Mahmoud Maktabi, Gustav Lejelind, Ellen Skafvenstedt, Daniel Josefsson, Sebastian Adolfsson, Rolf Anderzon and Simon Mogren.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The project “The Virtual Canvas” is an online exhibition that develops between November 2020 and April 2021.

12 artists (and artistic collectives) from around the world have been invited to share their different perspectives, reflections, solutions and/or comments on the world’s crises – referring to both the past and future, to the recent lockdown(s) and the new reality of a pandemic.

Each artist receives a space within the website, which they will be able to add to, design, shape and arrange, treating the web as a canvas.
Every month a new artistic project will appear on “The Virtual Canvas” website responding to the previous artists’ pieces. The project is structured like a chain: initiated first by artists responding to the crises, the following artists will create pieces responding to this first input, as well as including their own perspective.
Each new contribution will develop the narrative further until a collective work is created, coloured by many voices singing in many mediums.

Various artistic projects collected in the virtual exhibition space are an attempt to build an artistic dialogue and share the insights of creatives experiencing the current crises at various latitudes.
This multi-voiced story will change and take different courses depending on the participating artists, on the present situation and on our present condition. As the project evolves, the platform becomes an international common diary and a testimony of the time.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

The crises have exposed the structural inequalities within society, revealing the precarious imbalance at its heart. Yet a common factor uniting these disparities is a global state of suspension, uncertainty and anticipation – an atmosphere that seems to be typical of our time.

Can this global sense of uncertainty be utilized to rethink social structures? To achieve the unthinkable, one must un-think. Can this explosion of the status quo provide this opportunity? How can we (or is it possible to) emulate creation through forms of destruction?

Moreover, the physical restrictions of lockdown have more acutely exposed the new paradigm of mind/body/virtual, where the age-old distinction between the freedoms of the mind and limitations of the body has become transposed into the virtual. Now more than ever, it is the potential of the seemingly infinite space of the Internet that collides with the increasing number of physical barriers in the real world. Yet, which reality has a greater influence on our mind, its freedom, creative processes and artistic thought? Is our mind and creative thinking shaped more by limitations in the real, physical world or by virtual, seemingly endless opportunities?

ARTISTS

Why Quit (Karolina Balcer, Iwona Ogrodzka)

Renen

Post Noviki

Laura Ginès

Maess

Regev Amrani

Dimple B. Shah

Kino Manual (Aga Jarząb, Maciek Bączyk)

Hanna Wildow, Alva Willemark, Tony Karlsson Savci

Magda Franczak, Ludomir Franczak

Blanca Arias

Lara + Countervisions

SEE THE PROJECT’S WEBSITE  > www.thevirtualcanvas.site

ABOUT THE ORGANISERS
Curators:

Megan Black has run several multidisciplinary art projects with a focus on collective creating in Berlin, as well as in Tbilisi and Gori in collaboration with MasterPeace in Georgia. She studied at the University of Oxford, where she graduated with the best performance of 2020 in German Language and Literature. Currently she is based in Berlin, working for the project space bi’bak and freelance editing, translating and creating.

Anna Stec is an art historian (University of Wrocław, Poland) and art curator. For many years she was associated with the Art Transparent Foundation; she was one of the curators of the SURVIVAL Art Review (between 2014 and 2018) and project coordinator and curator at the Mieszkanie Gepperta Gallery (2012- 2017). She has authored several texts on art published in magazines and exhibition catalogues. Currently she is based in Barcelona (Spain). She collaborates as an art curator and project coordinator with Krupa Gallery (Wrocław, Poland).

Katarzyna Mlynczak-Sachs holds a PhD in political science but she decided to follow her passion and abandon the academic life for culture management. She was responsible for the coordination of international relations in the context of Wroclaw 2016 European Capital of Culture. She has been involved in many international projects, such as amongst others the Wroclaw exhibition “Dispossession” during Venice Biennale 2015. Since 2017, she has been managing Krupa Gallery, an art space and concept born in Wroclaw to promote artists and engage audiences into artistic exhibitions.

The project is implemented with members of the Bosch Alumni Network and in cooperation with Krupa Gallery Foundation.

Valentine’s Day is approaching – the celebration of love. Not all lovers, however, feel joy and butterflies in their stomachs. Love is also disappointment, abandonment, separation, loneliness. The latest series of works by Pola Dwurnik entitled “Unhappy Ending” consists of drawings, gouaches and lithographs telling about the end of love, the pain of separation, despair and longing. They were inspired by Ania Malinowska’s poems on the same subject, written in the last few years. Both artists analyse the morphology of the broken heart and the accompanying frustration, tenderly and even with a bit of humour. They avoid pathos and the heavy drama of the genre. The poems and drawings make up a beautiful, poetic artbook “Unhappy Ending. Poems for the Broken/Hearted”, which is about to hit the stands.

On the first day of the exhibition, on Saturday 13 February, we invite you to a meeting with the authors of the book.

Entire Paris in a blue haze, like in spirit – this quote from Różewicz was to be the motto of the exhibition. But when I opened the book to verify it, it wasn’t where I remembered it was. So maybe I was wrong. I may have mixed up some fragments. Perhaps it wasn’t Paris at all, and perhaps not spirit (denatured alcohol? Formalin?). Perhaps it was not even Różewicz. But that’s how my memory worked – it combined some bits in the context of the planned exhibition and its subject, and a “quote from Różewicz” came out.

Contradicting the feverish ordering of archives, there are the workings of memory – attempts to recreate that which has already been experienced on the basis of whatever shreds remain. Such memories are necessarily co-created by the present self.

On the one hand, they extract the essence of the meaning of events. They are like phenomena immersed in formaldehyde, which, removed from their former context, assume new meanings and look at us as if from the other side of the mirror.

On the other hand, this is a process of reproducing the missing elements on the basis of the preserved fragments, resembling the work of a conservator or an archaeologist who recreates an entire artefact from a tiny piece. It is a simulation of an imagined whole, with guesses and mistakes. Sometimes, the reconstructed work surpasses the small finding, adding more than there was before. But the authenticity of each such creation is supported by the authenticity of the original part. Although this loan could be unsecured.

However, knowing the nature of this process, it is difficult to expect faithfulness to some original. The works by Filip Rybkowski and Krzysztof Grzybacz use similar mechanisms to talk about things that may have existed or happened.

—

Filip Rybkowski’s works revolve around the relationship between the original and its derivative – a copy, representation, reconstruction. However, the artist inscribes an immanent error in this relationship. Sometimes, he reconstructs things that are not worth reconstructing. At other times, the process of reproduction overwhelms the original – a small fragment grows into an exaggerated, imagined idea of the prototype. Such imitation is doomed to failure because it reveals its own artificiality. The potential for deconstruction is inherent in it from the beginning.

Rybkowski creates a vicious circle of representation. First, he creates imitations of materials. A very Baroque idea, if not for the fact that alongside artificial marble there are also fake tiles or PVC. He then undermines the very division into “the real thing” and “copy” by combining fragments of found materials with their representations. His decisions revolve somewhere between examining this division and denying its usefulness in a disturbing manner.

Apart from his earlier works, the exhibition also features projects from the new series Sediment Studies. It also seems to be a reconstruction – but this time of something that may happen in the future. The painting hints that it comes from beyond the Anthropocene epoch – stalactites can grow up to several thousand years. However, despite the masterful mimeticism, even this painting is exposed and suspended in a bubble of obvious illusion.

—

The poetics of Krzysztof Grzybacz’s paintings is fairy-tale like, clearly kept in the convention of “magical thinking.” They could be afterimages that are left of sleep, single frames of memories that intently stare at us.

His pictures are as sensitive as our secret thoughts. Flowers hug each other, objects seek closeness. They show the relationships we sometimes imagine between them, or our own feelings and desires that we project on them. Flowers in December, Will you love me magically, Fade Into You.

When trying to interpret the stories contained in the paintings, we are under the impression of having retained this childish ability to not distinguish between what is animated and unanimated, worthy of attention and unimportant. We grasp the impressions and associations that arise around certain things or views, and find the courage to describe them. The entire description does not take place through the narrative, the painted plot, but mainly in the painting itself, in the chosen technique.

Krzysztof Grzybacz (b. 1993)

He has graduated from Prof. Andrzej Bednarczyk’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow.

His paintings combine intimacy and extraordinariness, evoking the impression of glow and peacefulness. They seem to depict excerpts from longer stories or scenes from the unusual life of objects. In his practice, he occasionally combines painting with objects or other techniques. He lives and works in Krakow.

He has participated in individual and collective exhibitions, including: By Mail Today Eleven Thoughts, Six of Them Were About Love (in duet with Zuzanna Bartoszek, Serce Człowieka, Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2020); Fix (Wolne Pokoje, Fundacja Artystów Kolonia, Gdańsk 2019); Krakers Cracow Art Week 2019 festival, 44^th Painting Biennale Bielska Jesień 2019; during the lockdown caused by the covid-19 pandemic, he took part in projects such as The Trouble with Double (Mozilla Hubs, VR exhibition), Exhibition for Your Apartment (Dawid Radziszewski Gallery).

Filip Rybkowski (b. 1991)

In 2015, he graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. His works from this period transcend the traditional boundaries of painting, entering the field of mosaic, objet trouvé and installation.

He uses various media: painting, installation, video, photography. He puts together the poetics of the fragment, juxtaposing original artefacts with reconstructions and images. He is interested in the problematic status of “authenticity” and the processes of historical construction of memory.

In his most recent works, the basic tool he uses is the critical act of reconstruction combined with reflection on the political nature of the gesture of restoration, preservation and conservation.

He has taken part in many exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including Dry Crust and Oceans of Liquid Matter (Horse and Pony Fine Arts, Berlin, 2019), Pets (Bunkier Sztuki, 2018), Scattered Rhymes (XY Gallery, Olomouc, 2018), What About This Abstraction? (Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw, 2017), individually or in a duet with Emilia Kina, including Innocent Eyes, Weak Arm (Sopa Gallery, Kosice, 2020), Miraż Travel (Wozownia Art Gallery, Toruń, 2019).

Kasia Kmita created the works that make up the Foyer exhibition in the kodra technique, which comes from the tradition of folk culture. These figurative cut-outs developed by the inhabitants of the Łowicz region were used to depict important events in the life of the community, such as holidays and rituals. Kmita uses them to create visual records of contemporary social life.
The artist combines her interest in the kodras with a fascination with cinema and the potential of the cinematographic language in creating still pictures.
If we looked at Kasia Kmita’s work as a form of direct animation, it would have to be described as a mockumentary. All the characters and scenes depicted by the artist have been witnessed, remembered and recreated by her as cut-outs.

Foyer is a continuation of the Horizontal Panorama project, shown at the New Horizons International Film Festival in Wrocław in 2019.
The subject of that exhibition was the festival audience. The artist depicted people who were connected by their desire to experience cinematographic works together.

Kmita’s new exhibition is located in the foyer of the Muranów cinema. It is a special place in the emotional topography of Warsaw cinema lovers, an institution symbolising the film culture. Its foyer acts as the vestibule of the screening rooms, where films are not consumed but experienced.

In this unique place, Kmita invites the viewers to a screening before the screening. She uses the figurative cut-outs to build a multi-threaded installation. The narrative of the exhibition is told in a language organised by the grammar of cinematography – editing, cutting, frame, sequences of subsequent scenes. The Heroine is our guide in this story, migrating between subsequent scenes. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is intentional and not coincidental, the plot moves from one place to another, the characters, including the fictional Heroine – the artist’s porte parole – are taken from life.

Kasia Kmita (b. 1972)

graduated in Painting from the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław. She has participated in numerous individual and collective exhibitions in Poland and abroad. Recipient of numerous awards in Polish and foreign painting competitions.

In 1996 she received the Award of the Minister of Culture and Art “Promotions ‘96.” In the 1998 Eugeniusz Geppert Competition, she received the Award of the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. In 2006, she was awarded at the “Fish Eye” Biennale of Young Art for a series of works combining elements of Polish folklore and pop culture. Named by the Łossskot magazine as one of the most interesting personalities in culture in 2007. Two-time recipient of the scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2011, 2017).

In her work, she uses a meticulously refined form of cut-out. She encapsulates her observations about contemporary culture, trends and lifestyle in colourful compositions. A careful observer of the changes taking place in society, she analyses the desires and mechanisms governing human behaviour and psyche.

Internet websites of the artist:
www.kasiakmita.com
www.kodry.kasiakmita.com

Press:

Vogue.pl: https://www.vogue.pl/a/kasia-kmita-miasto-w-wycinance

Contemporary Lynx: https://contemporarylynx.co.uk/it-is-the-act-of-watching-itself-that-brings-me-the-greatest-pleasure-an-interview-with-kasia-kmita

Magazyn Szum: https://magazynszum.pl/foyer-kasi-kmity-w-kinie-muranow/

Objects and places become authentic and concrete when they are experienced with all senses, actively, reflectively. Some places are devoid of reality, because we know them only from the outside, from a tourist’s perspective, through reading or stories. For many of us, the Wrocław mikvah is such a place. It used to be frequently visited, yet nowadays it is filled with water only a few times a year. It has been an essential place for the Jewish community in Wrocław, unique in terms of architecture, yet it is often absent from the mental maps of the city dwellers, and its ritual function remains vague to them. The mikvah has been a source of fascination to Noa Heyne, an Israeli artist based in Berlin. She has created an installation whose functioning and details refer to the architecture of the mikvah and its history. The work was created from scratch during Heyne’s several-week residence in Wrocław. It is now presented for the first time as one of the elements accompanying the Simcha Jewish Culture Festival.

Noa Heyne’s interactive installation makes the mikvah a physically tangible space. It invites us to the bathhouse and offers an extended experience which engages the senses and triggers more than just visual cognitive processes. The installation is comprised of a hydraulic system and sculptural elements that refer to the surrounding architecture as well as the human body. The hydraulic system holds wooden platforms placed in and around the pool. When the installation is activated by stepping on the platform, the visitor’s weight makes the sculpture move to the accompaniment of the sound of water.
Water plays a fundamental role both in the installation and in the ritual of purification – it is a universal symbol of change and power. Heyne’s object binds both of these meanings together; water set in motion by the pressure makes the floor move. It is possible due to the pipe system hidden under the platforms, inspired by the architectural solutions used in ritual bathhouses, which allows kosher water to be brought into the pool and mixed with ordinary water. The hydraulic system, although invisible, is a crucial element in Heyne’s installation. It enables head-to-toe, multisensory experience that allows us to actually feel the spatial qualities of the mikvah and understand the essence of the place not just through reason.
The installation strongly emphasises the dependence of our spatial orientation on the body posture, whose verticality expresses control over the environment and the gravity. Upright posture also brings a sense of confidence of living in an organised world whose essential part is the ground under our feet – not only as a physical point of reference that is always there, but also as the culturally and psychologically conditioned need for stability. The installation disturbs the pattern of moving forwards and backwards and forces submission to the up-down movement, which triggers associations with being submerged in the waters of the mikvah and literally causes us to lose our foothold. The moving floor introduces a sense of unusualness and destabilisation while referring to accumulated events from the past, or even secrets lurking under the surface. The work evokes sensual experiences, causing the body to adapt to its movement and act accordingly. What results is a kind of sensual harmony and symmetry between the object, space and the participants’ bodies invited to interact with it.

UNDERCURRENT is an intense deep-sea water current which is often imperceptible on the surface. It refers to the invisible power of the seas and oceans, which affects entire ecosystems, regardless of whether we are aware of it or not.

photo & video: Alicja Kielan

At the beginning of the 20th century, Wassily Kandinsky predicted that the art of “tomorrow” would enable us “to grasp the inner appeal of a truly emancipated
colour and form composition,” free from borrowings from the outside world. “A spiritual turn is speeding us on almost violently, now opening the doors to the dissolution of matter,” he wrote in the 1911 treatise On the Spiritual in Art, “it can be said that only a few ‘hours’ separate us from this absolute composition.”
For Kandinski, the creative act was associated with the “principle of innermost necessity” – a work of art is supposed to be an expression of the mystical powers that lie dormant in the artist. He viewed art as an important tool of spiritual practice, indispensable on the path of human development, necessary to “keep the soul at a certain height.”

Justyna Maksajda’s painting does not refer to the outside world; it neither recreates nor comments on the reality around us. Rather, it describes an internal state.
By means of painting, the artist captures a moment of stillness – a state of special concentration in which thought and the fleeting moment materialise thanks to colour and form. The practice of painting thus becomes tantamount to a spiritual practice. And like any other practice, it is inseparably connected with everyday life – it needs attention and focus, regularity and repetition. It is in everyday activities, seemingly trivial and irrelevant, that the artist finds a moment of contemplation. The aforementioned stillness, from which new paintings emerge, evokes associations with the practice of meditation – the art of focusing attention on the here and now. In this sense, Maksajda approaches painting as a spiritual and highly intellectual activity, a combination of intuitive actions and rational procedures – training for the soul and mind.

Kandinsky argued that the spiritual element of art is captured in the subtle relationships between form and colour. These subtleties, resulting from an artistic instinct, can be experienced at various levels in Justyna Maksajda’s painting. First of all, at the formal level, visual and purely aesthetic; but also beyond material categories and physical terms.
When given proper attention, a work of art can allow our mind to go beyond common concepts and develop (as Kandinsky would like) “the ability to see spiritual content in both material and abstract things, because it (…) enriches our lives and is absolutely necessary for our future .”

***

The Krupa Gallery Summer Stage is a series of exhibitions and accompanying cultural events that are organised in cooperation with the Makima Group.
Between June and August 2020, the Krupa Gallery will present three exhibitions of Polish female artists – painters who create abstract works, but adopt very different starting points in their practice.
The exhibitions will be held in the glass pavilion on the revitalised Old Town Boulevard in Wrocław, which will soon become a unique place regularly hosting international art projects.
The Summer Stage emerged out of the desire and need to look for solutions that would promote and popularise contemporary art and actively support artists’ work and development.
The purpose of the initiative is also to promote cooperation between the private sector and the field of culture and art. Some of the featured works will be (or have already been) purchased for the Krupa Gallery collection.

Programme:
26.06‒13.07.2020 | Iza Opiełka
17.07‒18.08.2020 | Magdalena Sadłowska
20.08‒7.09.2020 | Justyna Maksajda

‘Cause I see you
I’ll be your mirror
Lou Reed

The exhibition presents the latest works made by artists associated with the Faculty of Photography at the University of the Arts in Poznań — an environment bringing together a wide range of creative attitudes and approaches. Regardless of the variety of artistic views, the authors are enthusiasts of photography and the richness of new media stemming from it, which is the main means of communication and expression for them. Each work in this exhibition has a potential for artistic reflection on a photographic representation.

Photography has long ceased to be what it is commonly believed to be — it has become a highly mythologised, partly magical, practice. We believe it and do not believe it at the same time, just as if we needed such images. We accept today’s post-photographic representations in order to reject them after a while. These images are traps, simulated views and transmissions of barely possible things, tools meant for temporary mental alterness and organising meanings.

The artists have centred their creative experiences around recognising, analysing, and criticising how photography works and functions. Will they help us understand it by whispering seductively … I’ll be your image?

Artists :
Agnieszka Antkowiak
Michał Bugalski
Sławomir Decyk
Izabela Jurcewicz
Anna Kędziora
Konrad Kuzyszyn
Kate Ngan Wa Ao
Max Radawski
Mateusz Sadowski
Piotr Wołyński

The exhibition is part of the TIFF Festival “Processes”.

Opening houres:
2 – 4.09: 15:00-20:00
5 – 6.09: 12:00-19:00
6 – 22.09:  Wednesday – Saturday: 15:00-19:00

Curatorial tour: 5.09 (Saturday) godz. 17.00