Search results for ""Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw""

The work of Slovak sculptor Maria Bartuszova (1936-96) was first presented to international audiences in Kassel in 2007. Although her art has appeared in influential exhibitions and been included in prestigious contemporary art collections, up until now, she has yet to receive the widespread recognition she deserves. Dziewanska's book offers distinct perspectives on Bartuszova's work from renowned international critics in an effort to increase our awareness of her sculptures. Working alone behind the Iron Curtain, Bartuszova was one of a number of female artists who not only experimented formally and embarked intuitively on new themes, but who, because they were at odds with mainstream modernist trends, remained in isolation or in a marginalized position. Revealing her dynamic treatment of plaster-a material that, from a sculptor's point of view, is both primitive and common-the book deftly reveals how Bartuszova experimented with materials, never hesitating to treat tradition, accepted norms, and trusted techniques as simply transitory and provisional. Offering a much-needed history of a vibrant body of work, Maria Bartuszova: Provisional Forms is an important contribution to the literature on great female artists.

Read more less

One of Poland's most important and independent postwar artists, Andrzej Wroblewski (1927-57) created in his short life his own highly individual, suggestive, and prolific form of abstract and figurative painting that continues to inspire artists today. This volume offers a stunning presentation and thorough reevaluation of his work and its legacy in the international context of art history. Offering an insightful picture of the world of postwar painting in communist Europe, and highlighting Wroblewski's political engagement, the book helps us to understand the immensely evocative vision of war and oppression that he created. This close look at a painter and a period that are of growing interest for international art historians will serve to further cement Wroblewski in the postwar pantheon.

Read more less

The history of film students from the Global South who studied in Poland during the Cold War. As Poland’s second-largest city, Łódź was a hub for international students who studied in Poland from the mid-1960s to 1989. The Łódź Film School, a member of CILECT since 1955, was a favored destination, with students from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East accounting for one-third of its international student body. Despite the school’s international reputation, the experience of its filmmakers from the Global South is little known beyond Poland. Hope Is of a Different Color addresses the history of student exchanges between the Global South and the Polish People’s Republic during the Cold War. It sheds light on the experiences and careers of a generation of young filmmakers at Łódź, many of whom went on to achieve success as artists in their home countries, and provides insight into emerging areas of research and race relations in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays reflect on these issues from multiple perspectives, considering sociology, political science, art, and film history. The book also features previously unpublished photographs and film stills from private archives along with visual and written material collected at the Łódź Film School.

Read more less

With Art in a Disrupted World, art historian Agata Pietrasik presents a study of artistic practices that emerged in Poland during and after World War II. Pietrasik highlights examples of artworks by a number of Polish-born artists that were created in concentration camps and ghettos, in exile, and during the years of social, political, and cultural disintegration immediately following the war. She draws attention to the ethics of artistic practice as a method of fighting to preserve one’s own humanity amid even the most dehumanizing circumstances. Breaking out of entrenched historical timelines and traditional forms of narration, this book brings together drawings, paintings, architectural designs, and exhibitions, as well as literary and theatrical works created in this time period, to tell the story of Polish life in wartime. ​Employing an accessible, essayistic style, Pietrasik offers a new look at life in the ten years following the outbreak of World War II and features artists—including Marian Bogusz, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, and Józef Szajna—whose work has not yet found substantial audiences in the English-speaking world. Her reading of the art and artists of this period strives to capture their autonomous artistic language and poses critical questions about the ability of traditional art history writing to properly accommodate artworks created in direct response to traumatic experiences.

Read more less

In 1978, Zofia Rydet (1911 97) began work on a monumental project that would come to be known as her "Sociological Record": photographing the people of Poland at their homes, she produced an extraordinary archive of around twenty thousand negatives. The images include faces, interiors, furnishings, and more. The undertaking consumed Rydet so completely that she was never able to give it final shape through a book or an art show.Object Lessons, a new volume of essays inspired by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, helps to dispel the myths that have formed around the project in recent years and introduces the photographer to a new global audience. The essays here contextualize and interpret "Sociological Record" from different perspectives, opening up the work to further inquiry as both an object of interpretation and a subject of theoretical interest. Rydet herself remained unresolved over the matter of how to define her work, leaving the viewer to ponder whether her magnum opus is a piece of art or science. What does remain undisputed is that "Sociological Record" is a striking testimony of its time. A fascinating celebration of Rydet's work that is sure to spur on fresh debate about art as a social practice and a tool of knowledge, Object Lessons reminds us of photography's incredible power to provide a visual way of thinking and a provocative method for archiving the world.

Read more less

PL

Read more less

This volume coins the term "Team 10 East" as a conceptual tool to discuss the work of Team 10 members and fellow travelers from state-socialist countries - such as Oskar Hansen of Poland, Charles Polonyi of Hungary, and Radovan Niksic of Yugoslavia. This new term allows the book's contributors to approach these individuals from a comparative perspective on socialist modernism in Central and Eastern Europe and to discuss the relationship between modernism and modernization across the Iron Curtain. In so doing, Team 10 East addresses "revisionism" in state-socialist architecture and politics as well as shows how Team 10 East architects appropriated, critiqued, and developed postwar modernist architecture and functionalist urbanism both from within and beyond the confines of a Europe split by the Cold War.

Read more less

Thanks to its very nature, performance enters into natural dialogue with art, new media, politics, and the social sphere as a whole. Always happening in the here and now, and with a unique freedom and openness to the unknown, performance is a medium with a special ability to question its own subjects, materials, and languages. As a result, it is often best reflected in the dynamic character of contemporary art and contemporaneity in the broadest sense of the word. Points of Convergence explores these ideas and investigates critical approaches to performance, ultimately aiming to stimulate new discussion between theorists and practitioners. With twelve essays by leading figures in the field of performance arts, this illustrated volume is structured in two parts. The first, authored by academics in the discipline, features an introduction to key areas of scholastic research. The second part, authored by curators and other researchers, then focuses on an account of individual traditions of performance. Taken together, the contributions identify new possibilities for interaction between the theoretical aspects of performance art and the ways performance plays out within local contexts.

Read more less

In the late 1960s and '70s, artists in Yugoslavia rejected the official language of expression licensed by the regime, abstract art, and replaced it with "anti-art" - works on the borderline of the form that balanced between amateurism and professionalism and breached modernist conventions. These artists seized upon the opportunities to disseminate their art offered by film clubs - public institutions that brought together amateur artists and served as enclaves of freedom. "As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film" explores this crucial period in the Yugoslav art scene and situates it in the broader cultural context of Central and Eastern Europe.

Read more less

This catalog accompanies Edi Hila: Painter of Transformation, the first retrospective exhibition devoted to the Albanian painter Edi Hila, considered one of the last masters from Eastern Europe. Through Hila’s eyes, the Eastern European experience is stripped of accident or adventure and instead gives weight to distilled general truths. The catalog traces key moments from his formative artistic experience, including a firsthand account of his infamous 1972 painting, Planting of Trees, which because of its unusual use of color and form that ran contrary to approved socialist realist doctrine, led to his being forced to labor in a poultry processing plant. In the evenings, however, he secretly created a series of drawings documenting the life of the workers, which became the Poultry series, harrowing in its raw realism. The publication continues to track Hila’s practice through the 1990s, when we find the artist carefully observing life after the fall of Enver Hoxha’s regime and his attempts at depicting the realities of the Albanian transformation on the precipice of the new millennium, before concluding with a review of Hila’s contemporaneous practice, which discloses more the limitations and traps of transformation than its promises. Richly illustrated with reproductions of Hila’s work in full color, many of them never before published, this is a groundbreaking catalog, one that will help establish Hila’s international reputation as a master painter of the region and Europe at large.

Read more less

Consciousness Neue Bieremiennost was an art group formed in the mid-1980s in Poland by three sculptors: Miroslaw Balka, Miroslaw Filonik, and Marek Kijewski. Their collaborative exhibitions, which included action art, performances, and sculptures, mounted political protests by mocking highlights of the communist calendar, such as Women's Day, Victory Day, and Miner's Day. This volume recreates the history of the group and its often fleeting creations and sets it in the context of Polish life and politics of the 1980s and the artistic scene it spawned. Offering new insight into Polish art of the '80s, and particularly into the relationship between the communist art system and the alternative art scene that opposed it, the book offers the most comprehensive picture yet of this group's work and legacy.

Read more less

Zofia Kulik’s rich artistic career has a dual nature. Between 1970 and 1987, she worked alongside Przemysław Kwiek as a member of the duo KwieKulik, after which she began to develop a successful individual career. While KwieKulik’s work has been well established as central to the East European neo-avant-garde art lexicon of the 1970’s and ’80s, Kulik’s solo work has yet to be examined in depth. The first publication devoted solely to her work, this monograph analyzes the themes of her rich and complex oeuvre, addressing the (post)communist condition, artistic labor, intermediality, and the conditions of working as a female artist. The book forms a portrait of Kulik as an artist whose work is both deeply focused and rich in variations that reflect the socio-political shifts in her native Poland. With contributions from leading art historians, including Edit András, Angela Dimitrakaki, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Suzana Milevska, and Tomasz Załuski.

Read more less

The Other Transatlantic is attuned to the brief but historically significant moment in the postwar period between 1950 and 1970 when the trajectories of the Central and Eastern European art scenes on the one hand, and their Latin American counterparts on the other, converged in a shared enthusiasm for Kinetic and Op Art. As the axis connecting the established power centers of Paris, London, and New York became increasingly dominated by monolithic trends including Pop, minimalism, and conceptualism another web of ideas was being spun linking the hubs of Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Sao Paulo. These artistic practices were dedicated to what appeared to be an entirely different set of aesthetic concerns: philosophies of art and culture dominated by notions of progress and science, the machine and engineering, construction and perception. This book presents a highly illustrated introduction to this significant transnational phenomenon in the visual arts.

Read more less

This book considers the oeuvre of Ion Grigorescu, one of the most charismatic and original artists from the former Eastern bloc, who until 1989 worked in relative isolation and whose art reflects his search for a place within an extremely oppressive political system. Grigorescu, born in 1945 in Bucharest and educated as a painter, was one of the first Romanian conceptual artists and advocates of anti-art, postulating a radical consolidation of artistic activities with quotidian life. He is the creator of numerous films, photographic series, and actions recorded on film, as well as drawings and collages that documented both his private life and the passage of the Romanian people from life under communist regimes to the realities of expansive capitalism. The retrospective understanding of his art presented here offers much more than just another lost chapter in the history of the Central European avant-garde - Grigorescu's work is revealed to be singular, introducing religious and spiritual motifs into conceptual art and demonstrating his conviction that political crises are rooted in a crisis of the spirit.

Read more less

A rebel and feminist, the Switzerland-born Miriam Cahn is one of the major artists of her generation. Widely known for her drawings and paintings, she also experiments with photography, moving images, sculptures, and performance art. Cahn's diverse body of work is disturbing and dreamlike, filled with striking human figures pulsing with an energy both passionate and violent. These pieces, along with Cahn's reflections on artistic expression, have always responded to her contemporary moment. In the 1980s, her work addressed the feminist, peace, and environmental movements, while the work she produced in the 1990s and early 2000s contains allusions to the war in the former Yugoslavia, the conflict in the Middle East, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Her recent production tackles ever-evolving political conflicts, engaging with the European refugee crisis and the #metoo movement. Miriam Cahn: I as Human examines different facets of the artist's prolific and troubling oeuvre, feat

Read more less