Agnieszka Polska

Born 1985 in Lublin, lives and works in Berlin and Cracow.
Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow and Universitaet der Kunste Berlin.
Diploma – prof. Agata Pankiewicz’s photography studio.

Exhibitions (selected):

2011 Group Show, Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome, Italy (forthcoming)
2011 Antje Majewski, The World of Gimel, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (forthcoming)
2011 A Thousand Years of Modernity, BWA in Tarnów, Poland (forthcoming)
2011 Based in Berlin, KunstWerke Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
2011 We Went to Croatan, Hardware Medien Kunstverain, Dortmund, Germany
2011 A Birdwatcher’s Passion. On Creating a Myth, CCA Sokół, Nowy Sącz, Poland
2011 The Promise, Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris, France
2011 Transylvania 2, Arsenał, Poznań, Poland
2010 Early Years, KunstWerke Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
2010 Vedo Cose Che Non Ci Sono, by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Rome, Italy
2010 Un seminaire a la campagne, France Fiction, Paris, France
2010 Multiplex, peer to space, Munich, Germany (curated by VVORK)
2010 Disobedience, Lmakprojects, New York, USA
2010 Good Old Days, Aarhus Kunstbygning, Aarhus, Denmark
2010 The Past Is a Foreign Land, Znaki Czasu Centre for Contemporary Art, Toruń, Poland
2009 Anabasis, Ludwik Grohman Villa, Łódź, Poland
2009 Freedom of Re-Cycling, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland
2009 QU'EST-CE QUE C'EST DEGUEULASSE?, city installation, Vienna, Austria
2009 Polish Landscape, Contemporary Art Museum, Minsk, Belarus
2008 Ain't No Sorry, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland
2008 Bewegte Stilleben, Kunstverein, Potsdam, Germany
2007 16 Things That May Not Happen, artpol, Cracow, Poland

Collective exhibitions (selected):

2011 Solo show, Żak Branicka Galerie, Art Basel Statements, Switzerland
2011 Gardener's Responsibility, Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna, Austria
2011 Duet, Goldex Poldex, Cracow, Poland (with Tomasz Kowalski)
2011 Garden, BWA Zielona Góra, Poland
2010 Solo show, Żak Branicka Galerie, ABC Berlin, Germany
2010 Three Videos with Narration, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cracow, Poland
2010 Decades, Kunstmuseum Dieselkraftwerk Cottbus, Cottbus, Germany
2010 SPLACE, TV Tower, Berlin, Germany (with Antje Majewski)
2010 Three Videos with Narration, Zak | Branicka, Berlin, Germany

Links

www.agnieszkapolska.com
www.zak-branicka.com
www.georgkargl.com

Agnieszka Polska
is one of the most interesting young Polish artists. She is also one of the very few who are equally precise and meticulous in using the medium of collage and animated film when tackling the issues of affection, perception and reflection on the history of contemporary art with its social and political conditions. Her wonderfully ethereal, visually rich and intuitive narrations are characterised by an interesting use of the philosophical heritage of the 20^th century, especially psychoanalysis.

Why have I decided to nominate Agnieszka Polska for the young painters’ competition? One of the reasons for my choice is certainly the way she deals with Włodzimierz Borowski’s artistic output, which is representative of the whole trend of conceptual and painting pursuits of Polish art of the 1960’s. “Sensitivity to Colour” (2010) is based on the artist’s black-and-white photographic documentation of his action “8^th Syncretic Show” from 1968. The film, initially following the documentary genre, is a walk through the reconstruction of space with a narrative delivered by a voice deceptively similar to that of Krystyna Czubówna, a well-known Polish television reader of wildlife documentaries. It is a walk with the camera sliding gently through the works and details, their reconstructions or impressions, showing their matter and texture in close-up. The reader delivers her lines about the biological nature of Borowski’s forms and quotes a review comparing his objects to coral reefs. This and similar metaphors must have inspired Polska in the way she presents art usually treated with excessive reverence. Here, Borowski’s creation gains extraordinary softness and sensuality, approximating what Lucy Lippard calls “excentric abstraction”. This is also the way Polska deals with the film matter, where the “emotional picture” is built mainly by movement and duration, occasionally accentuated by still frames resembling still lifes, in which she plays with alternating detail and focus. What is also interesting is the way Polska clashes seriousness and the so-called objectivism of conceptual art with the dynamics, sensuality and intimacy of the painter’s gesture, suddenly changing Czubówna’s audio narration into a rhythmical rock ballad, still sticking to the same visual language. In this way, her idea for Borowski’s re-interpretation turns into a critical project, clearly emphasizing her own perspective.

I am equally emotional about the film “Duet” (2011), prepared in co-operation with Tomasz Kowalski, which resembles a road movie and tells the story of lost customs from the former eastern borderlands of Poland. It resembles the poetics of the Swiss duo Fischli & Weiss, surrealist narrations by Maya Deren, or the latest project – “How the Work Is Done” (2011), also featuring in this year’s Geppert Competition. As it was the case with the “8^th Syncretic Show”, the artist delves back in history. The picture is very simple, built on two interlacing levels: abstract animation with the image of a lump of liquid glass (as the narrator’s voice informs us, balancing between fact and fiction) and a human hand tackling the matter. It shows abstract close-ups of glass objects on a black background and a “veristic”, quasi-documentary staging of an Academy sculpture studio from 1956, where a strike was taking place. The artist does not inform us about the actual reasons for this action. Even though in fact the protest was fairly prosaic and concerned insufficient work space for the graduates, we believe the incident to have been par excellence political in nature. And this is the way Polska’s work appears to be in the context of her artistic sensitivity. The viewer’s eye follows it, re-distributing what is visible, sensual – to use Rancière’s terms – within the history of art understood as a socially committed discipline.

Ewa Małgorzata Tatar