Opening: June 23, 2017, 7 pm
The exhibition is on view through 16 September, 2017
Art Archives is an exhibition offering insight into the preoccupations and passions of artists for whom collecting has become part of their artistic practice. The collections of one of the most significant contemporary painters and a leading conceptualist are a presentation of two artistic narratives where the metaphor of the archive opens up a space for discussing the ways we read art and write history. Tomasz Ciecierski’s Picture Archive and Jarosław Kozłowski’s Time Archive are two collections that have been transformed by their authors into two spectacular installations. The exhibition is a double voice of artists whose art, stemming from different traditions and addressing different references, enters in a dialogue on the basis of thinking about the ways of writing (art) history.
Jarosław Kozłowski’s Times Archive, consisting of a monumental collection of alarm clocks, amassed over a time span of over 25 years, is the artist’s most spectacular installation to date dealing with time, a category he has explored in his art since the end-1960s. A huge installation with rows of metal racks and hundreds of alarm clocks showing different times and marked with the initials of their former owners, it is an archive of personal times, non-monopolized memories, and alternative histories. The aesthetics of accumulation of a vast collection of all kinds of alarm clocks running according to their own time finds an extension in the swooshing noise of their simultaneous ticking. Contrary to the proverbial silence of the archives, the Times Archive space is activated by sounds, resounding with the memory triggered off by hundreds of ticking clocks. In Kozłowski’s earlier installations, it was impossible to get anchored in time; his manipulations of clocks, each of which showed a different time, deprived the spectator of temporal points of reference. The artist makes it impossible for us to trust any measures, norms , or standards; even the simple question of “what time is it?” becomes a trap here.
Tomasz Ciecierski’s Pictures Archive consists of photographs, sketches, collages, drawings, quotations, comments, notes, photographs of unfinished paintings, of own works and those of other artists, of completed and uncompleted projects. Presented on several dozen panels, they offer insight into why art is made and what it is made of. Hundreds of photographic “visual notes,” reflections on own practice, dedications for favorite artists, thoughts on recently read books and recently seen exhibitions, ironic polemics with tradition, a lot of sense of humor, and a “great deal of doubt” – all this comprises a kind of diary, “written” over time by an artist/collector. A part of this archive is a vast collection of photos and postcards connected with art and artists: hundreds of images of old and contemporary masters, studio interiors, museum scenes, artists at work, all aspects of painting, including street painters and painting accessories. Started in the 1970s, this collection is a kind of companion guide to Ciecierski’s art history, one in which academic discourses alternate with popular narratives and the artist’s personal memory. The postcards and photographs presented on lecterns serve as a background and complement for the panels, where the artist unfolds various visual themes, ringing bells, highlighting correspondences of word and image. The whole collection eludes compartmentalization, displaying neither chronology nor continuity; the artist jumps from one subject to another, returning to certain motifs, reconfiguring them, and he writes, quoting, on one of the panels: “Perhaps it is precisely chronological disorder which I cannot control that is meaningful.”
These two quasi-archives obviously prefer individual memory and experience to the records of institutionalized art history and official history. With their doubts, their lack of systemization and hierarchy, they also – despite the archive metaphor in the title – resist the archival ritualization of memory.
Tomasz Ciecierski (b. 1945) is a painter, author of drawings, photographs, collages, photomontages, and relief paintings, hailed as one of the most outstanding contemporary Polish painters. He graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1971, and worked at his alma mater from 1972 to 1985, from 1979 as a professor of drawing. Recipient of fellowships from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1981, 1983) and the Musée d’art Contemporain in Nîmes (1990-1991). Winner of the 1991 Jan Cybis Prize for lifetime achievement. He lives and works in Warsaw.
Jarosław Kozłowski (b. 1945) is an author of drawings, installations, paintings, artist’s books, and performances, critically recognized as a leading representative of conceptual art. He studied at the State Graduate School of Plastic Arts in Poznań (today the University of Fine Arts in Poznań) in 1963-1969; taught there from 1970; served as rector 1981-1987. He has also taught at the Statens Kunstakademi Oslo (1993-1997), the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (1996–2004), and the Art Academy Without Walls in Lusaka (1999 and 2001). In 1971, co-initiator of the NET international artist network. From 1972 till 1990, manager of the Akumulatory 2 Gallery in Poznań; 1991-1993, gallery and collection curator at the CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. He lives and works in Poznań.
