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Friend of a Friend

“Friend of a Friend” is a con­cept based on the prin­ciple of frien­dly col­laboration between con­tem­porary art gal­leries. It puts together Warsaw-​based spaces as hosts with inter­national guests, and thus aims to establish an alter­native plat­form for com­mer­cial gal­leries to present con­tem­porary art. The group exhibition prepared at Raster will inc­lude works by Breyer P-Orridge (1950, UK) from Zurich’s Galerie Bern­hard, Andrea Kvas (1986, IT) and Nick Bastis (1985, US) from Vienna’s Ermes-​Ermes gal­lery, as well as Olaf Brzeski. 

current show

Przemek Matecki
SMALL PAINTINGS

In his latest series of pain­tings, which he worked on non­stop for the past year or more, Matecki takes on the vast­ness of art. A tan­gible symbol of its fecun­dity is the heavy piles of super­fluous exhibition catalogs and art magazines which the artist brow­ses through in search of inspiring material for his own work. Matecki gives new life to reproduc­tions, trans­for­ming them into sharp, witty miniature oil pain­tings. The treat­ments he applies generate sur­prising effects. Here art is sub­mit­ted to an authorial com­pres­sion and regains its vigor. Often with a single gesture, Matecki extracts the essence from the work of other artists and creates entirely new pain­tings exuding energy and humor, a kind of con­tem­porary, masterly capriccio.

2017 shows

Oskar Dawicki
MARY

Oskar Dawicki, a literary and film figure, an artist known as a prac­titioner of total per­for­mance, presents this time a dys­topian nar­rative: a kind of script, or more precisely a recon­struc­tion, of a per­for­mance originally direc­ted in a dream. The cen­tral figure in his vision is a pregnant woman, the heroine of our times, nourisher of the unborn but also caretaker of the dead. As befits a doub­ting artist, the world of his creation is full of ambivalence.

warsaw gal­lery week­end 2017

Mika Tajima
AIR

Sourced from the mul­tiple architec­tonic and tech­nological realities that exist in Warsaw, the sub­jects of Tajima’s exhibition—machine, book, and body—are unseen. Instead they provide the under­lying tech­nical material for the hardware-​laden sculp­tures and abs­tract woven textiles in AIR. Together the objects intimate a still obstinate and unreadable body in trans­for­mation. Skin per­forated. Mind laced. Input ready. Con­figured for performance—work, pleasure, war. Not yet fully machine.

The exhibition at Raster will be the first individual show of the artist’s works in this part of Europe, premiering Sep­tem­ber 2017 as part of Warsaw Gal­lery Weekend.

warsaw gal­lery week­end 2017

Krzysztof Pruszkowski
Barrier

In 1977, Krzysz­tof Prusz­kow­ski, a Polish-​born photographer residing in France today, was not yet a legal resident. As a man without a coun­try, he began a project that bore the stark, Polish title Barierka (Bar­rier). Over several months, he produced a few hun­dred black-and-white photographs depic­ting the streets of Paris, cut off at various angles by the metal bloc­kades residents have come to know so well. The exhibition of photographs and album reveal a series of images as in a silent film, with only one hero – barierka in the title role.

2017 exhibitions

Michelle Rawlings
GIRL TALK

Rawlings seeks in her work a new, con­tem­porary female iden­tity: creative, sub­jec­tive, intuitive, and per­fec­tly at home in the digital world. Her intimate pain­ting com­bines visual bril­liance and mul­tiplicity with reticent con­tem­plation.
The main element of her “Girl Talk” exhibition is an instal­lation prepared from a range of objects of varying sizes modeled on the struc­ture of room dividers. The pain­tings accom­panying these sculp­tural pieces are made of silk, hand-​embroidered, pain­ted and prin­ted, in the spirit of a diary of images. The exhibition is com­pleted with charac­teristic, small easel pain­tings by Raw­lings, a con­tinuation of her intimate color studies.

2017 exhibitions

Karolina Jabłońska, Tomasz Kręcicki, Cyryl Polaczek
POTENCY

Hellish Road, Ear­th­worms, The Night­mare, Stran­gling, Snake & Tit—we are showing these and other works pain­ted in recent months, weeks and days in an exhibition of three young artists wor­king in the Kraków district of Zabłocie. The “potency” from the title is the name of the small gal­lery they foun­ded together and have operated for the last couple of years, but also an expres­sion of a ravenous appetite: for unfeigned emotions, for pain­ting every day and grab­bing pic­tures by the throat. A Warsaw premiere of the most promising pain­ting for­mation to rise up in recent years.

2016/17 exhibitions

Jan Smaga
ARTONS

Włodzimierz Borowski’s Artons, from which the title of Jan Smaga’s exhibition is taken, is one of the most intriguing and original series of works in the history of Polish modern art. Their striking materiality and amor­phous, introver­ted struc­ture inspired Smaga, a photographer often wor­king with exhibiting institutions and well-​known for his experimen­tal documen­tation tech­niques, to con­duct his own creative process based on the legen­dary works of Borow­ski. Using photography, Smaga broke the Artons down into elemen­tary par­tic­les, in order to reas­sem­ble them into a new, two-​dimensional whole—a kind of visualization of the cosmos inter­woven in the material of art.

Warsaw Gal­lery week­end 2016

Rafał Bujnowski
MAN ON TREE

The works of Rafał Buj­now­ski con­tinually engage in a dialogue with the fun­damen­tal proper­ties of pain­ting. The artist is interested in what pain­tings are essen­tially for, how they func­tion in architec­tural and social space, but also the manner of their creation. These con­siderations have led him to radical solutions and far-​reaching formal restraint. The phenomenon of his pain­ting con­sists in the con­stant balan­cing between represen­tation and the illusion of represen­tation. The pain­ting process, often purely mechanical, leads to sur­prising results and laun­ches another, sym­metrical, process of reading the com­pleted pain­ting, which depends on the variable ligh­ting, distance, and the involvement of the viewer.

2016 EXHIBITIONS

Slavs and Tatars
SOCIETY OF RASCALS

For their second show at Raster, the Slavs and Tatars col­lec­tive presents an instal­lation in the form of a pickle-​juice bar. The title Society of Rascals (Towarzystwo Szubrawców) was drawn from the name of a now-​forgotten literary society of 19th-century Vil­nius, famous for its heavily ironic, caustic displays of satire that stood coun­ter to the self-​important stance of the roman­tics, their sooth­saying and exal­ted engagement in the nationalist discourse. The pic­kled juices served by the artists along with provocative lexical gym­nastics are meant to sug­gest an antidote for the pathos of Polish patriotism, while also expres­sing their own soured regard for any politics based on the oppositional binary of us-versus-them.

2014 EXHIBITIONS

Aneta Grzeszykowska
SELFIE

(Polski) Mistyfikacja należy do ulubionych metod twórczych Anety Grzeszykow­skiej. Artystka kon­sekwent­nie, wręcz obsesyj­nie rozkłada na części swój wizerunek, znika bądź pod­szywa się pod cudze tożsamości. Analiza procesów autokreacji­ – jed­nego z fun­damen­tal­nych tematów sztuki, ale także pod­stawowej kwestii dla kon­dycji dzisiej­szego, post­medial­nego społeczeństwa – ­jest również prze­wod­nim motywem naj­now­szej serii zdjęć.

raster editions


Behind reason

A series of prints on the over­looked story of mysticism within moder­nity, made to accompany “Beyonsense”, Slavs and Tatars’ Projects 98 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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