WARSAW GAL­LERY WEEK­END 2023

Janek Simon
SIXTEENTH WORLD

The work of Janek Simon grows out of experien­ces of travel between diverse cul­tures, economies and visions of the future, which the artist com­bines using innovative digital tools and DIY practice. The sculp­ture series “Meta Folklore”, executed over the past two years, is an artistic, tech­nological and political fantasy—a vision of a new, univer­sal art created using artificial intel­ligence fed by a database of thousands of non-​academic sculp­tures from all over the world.

WARSAW GAL­LERY WEEK­END 2023

Oskar Zięta
COURTYARD SCULPTURES

Oskar Zięta’s design prac­tice derives from a moder­nistic ethos of innovation and tech­nology which drives aesthetics. The point of depar­ture for the project prepared especially for the Raster Sculp­ture Garden is the figure of the rug-​beating frame typically found in the cour­tyard of a housing com­plex, from which the artist explores a sur­prising space between func­tional garden fur­niture and an abs­tract, futuristic spatial forms.

EXHIBITIONS 2023

Alicja Pakosz
VORTICES

The first individual show at Raster by Alicja Pakosz (born 1996) is a nar­rative woven around the figure of a toxic landscape—obsessively retur­ning as a clas­sic motif from the history of pain­ting and also a vision evoking fear, an under­lying anxiety. An image appearing in the least expec­ted moment like hal­lucinations pres­sing under the eyelids. Something morbid and not entirely benign. The artist plays out this story like film frames in a series of pain­tings in two dif­ferent scales and a fully-​formed diorama.

EXHIBITIONS 2023

Zofia Rydet
ENDLESSLY DISTANT ROADS

Zofia Rydet (1911–1997), creator of the iconic Sociological Record and the fan­tastic World of Feelings and Imagination, was an artist gifted with a sense for observing the entropy of the world around her. This excep­tional photographic per­spec­tive is revealed in all its power in the series Endles­sly Distant Roads, executed in 1980. In the exhibition at Raster, we present a selec­tion of 40 photographs from this unusual and rarely shown collection.

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.

2016 exhibitions

Salon of New Photography

This exhibition takes on the, per­haps, dated for­mula of the artistic salon, set­ting the emotional focus on individual images—works of photography and their distinct strength in replicating, con­struc­ting and injec­ting a dose of magic into reality. We invited a few dozen con­tem­porary artists to each exhibit a single work created in the past 2-3 years. The col­lec­tion on show, thus, is not only an assort­ment of the most intriguing exam­ples of new Polish photography, but also a record of the most magnetic – in the visual and emotional sense – obses­sions that drive each individual artist to act within the medium.

raster editions


Photographs

A limited edition of Zbigniew Libera “Photographs” album with an original 2004 photograph by the artist, signed and num­bered on the back.

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EXHIBITIONS IN POLAND

Zbigniew Rogalski’s exhibition at the Miejski Ośrodek Sztuki

(Polski) “Rzadko jest tak, że patrząc na obraz widzimy go w całej okazałości. Możemy go zobaczyć albo z dystansu albo z bliska, przyglądając się detalom, próbując wyłapać wzrokiem pociągnięcie pędzla. Aspekt patrzenia jest dla sztuki kluczowy. Możemy dowol­nie przyglądać się dziełom, ale równocześnie nie możemy ich dotknąć. Kiedy jesteśmy ograniczeni brakiem jed­nego ze zmysłów, wtedy nasilają się pozostałe. A kiedy przed­miot, na który patrzymy nie jest zbyt wyraźny, wyostrzamy wzrok.”
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