Opening: Friday, 22.04.2022, 7 pm
23.04.22–04.06.2022
Tuesday–Saturday, 12.00–19.00
The exhibition presents the activities of an artist whose image combines an experimenter and media analyst with an anarchic neo-Dadaist, an heir to avant-garde traditions with an enthusiast of the cultural periphery, and a classic of the neo-avant-garde with a challenger of the artistic establishment. From the very beginning, Józef Robakowski’s work has been imbued with irony and a perverse sense of humour.
His early gestures questioning artistic traditions and standards, such as nailing a photograph of a colander to a board or presenting “tacky curiosities” signed by a fictitious character, Józef Korbiela, were already mocking.
The master of artistic mystification was fond of setting traps for gullible viewers, presenting, for example, alleged recordings of thoughts in the series Astral Photography (1976–2002) accompanied by a commentary ridiculing the pseudo-scientific jargon of authoritative conceptualists.
In keeping with the tradition of clownish artists, he often ridiculed artistic myths, especially the modernist celebration of the “creative individual”. He willingly, but above all with contrariness, played the role of such a mocked individual himself, appearing on screen with antlers on his head, with his chest pushed out, hooked up to electricity or subjecting his face to masochistic practices. Not sparing his own ego, he subjected his image to merciless vivisection, presenting his own likenesses with a wink of an eye in Contrary Art (1955–2021).
An unparalleled manipulator, he kept his distance from the hypocrisy of art and the nonsense of changing reality. In the mid-1980s, he ironised on ideological phantasms in the grotesquely heroic gestures of the photographic series Art Is Power! A quarter of a century later, in the video Little Pole (2010), he parodied the notions of Polishness inculcated in children and transferred into the realm of the absurd the persistent maintenance of the phantasm of national identity based on myths of heroism, honour, and homeland.
The exhibition Art Through a Colander Hole shows the self-ironic and mocking dimension of the artistic practice of Józef Robakowski, a perverse mocker and radical provocateur.
Józef Robakowski is an artist, art historian and academic professor, and the creator of films, videos, photographic series, installations, objects, performances, multimedia actions and conceptual projects.
Born in 1939 in Poznań, he earned a degree in art history and museum studies from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, and majored at the Faculty of Cinematography of the Leon Schiller National Higher School of Films, Television and Theatre in Łódź, where, from 1970 to 1981, he taught and ran the Photography and Visual Advertising Unit. In 1995 he returned to the Łódź School, and ran the Studio of Multimedia Actions there until 2017. He also taught in the Faculty of Cultural Studies of the University of Łódź (1982–1983), at the Łódź College of Humanities and Economics (2001–2006).
Co-founder of a number of artistic collectives, e.g. Oko (1960), STKF Pętla (1960–1966), Zero-61 (1961–1969), Krąg (1965–1967). Co-founder of the Workshop of the Film Form (1970–1977), and Telewizyjna Grupa Twórcza Stacja Ł (1991–1992). In 1978 he founded (with Małgorzata Potocka) the Exchange Gallery (Galeria Wymiany) in Łódź, which he runs to this day. Initiator of numerous artistic events, curator and co-curator of several dozen exhibitions, publisher, author of texts and publications. He lives and works in Łódź.
