Opening: Thursday, June 7, 2018, 7 pm
The exhibition is on view through July 28, 2018,
Tuesday – Saturday, 12 noon – 7 pm
“I was ashamed of what was happening . . .” In an interview, Jarosław Kozłowski remembers a sense of shame caused by what happened in Poland in 1968: “It suddenly turned out that part of our society was undesirable, needed to be got rid of. This affected tens of thousands of Jewish Poles, who were forced to leave the country. They were going virtually overnight, leaving their jobs which they had been fired from, their homes, belongings, and friends.”
The artist’s reaction was the installation Situation, presented 50 years ago at Wrocław’s Pod Moną Lizą Gallery, with dozens of pairs of shows left by their users scattered on the floor. The exhibition was accompanied by an essay published in the Odra monthly, featuring several photographs from the Shame series. Taken 50 years ago, the pictures have been reproduced in numerous publications, but never before presented as standalone works.
The dozen or so black-and-white images have been juxtaposed with the much later works from the drawing series Cover Your Shame and Cover Your Hypocrisy (1994-2017). The abstract drawings allude slyly to the photographs and their context, becoming a way of updating their subject matter.
It is an update that deals with denial, obscurity, hypocrisy. Including the hypocrisy of art and its images, which draw our attention away from reality; images that obscure rather than reveal anything. Hearkening back to what happened 50 years ago, evoking that sense of shame, the artist reflects on the role of art, on its shameless spectacles that use images to obscure, aestheticize, and beguile.
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 till 2017; 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.
