CONSTELLATIONS
Reeha Lim, Zbigniew Rogalski and Jin Ruoxi

This week­end, April 12-13, we invite you to Raster for the opening of a new exhibition prepared in cooperation with Shanghai-​based Vacancy gal­lery as part of the 2nd edition of the inter­national project of Warsaw’s Con­stel­lations gal­leries.
We present the works of three artists, Reeh Lim (b. 1994), Zbigniew Rogal­ski (b. 1974) and Jin Ruoxi (b. 1997).

Gvantsa Jishkariani
TRAUMA PORN

Jishkariani, who was born the same year that Geo­r­gia regained its indepen­dence, can indeed be brutally honest, and she does com­bine for­malism with morality, but generational traumas are also reflec­ted in her works. The star­ting material for these pieces is the decorative tapestries that were popular in the Soviet Union, which the artist decon­structs and proces­ses by applying embroidered mottos.

Dominika Olszowy
GLOBUS HYSTERICUS

The exhibition is titled „Globus Hystericus”. This sump­tuous Latin phrase refers to a common psychosomatic disorder—simply a lump in the throat. Whether a frog in the throat or a bent treetop, every crisis has a tan­gible shape, and every shape has its artist. A healer.

Aneta Grzeszykowska
KARMA

Karma is a nar­rative of animalization, but also the per­sonification of bodies reduced to the role of objects.

Olaf Brzeski
SHIP

In the Raster garden, Olaf Brzeski presents a souvenir family photo. But it takes the original form of a spatial sculp­tural com­position of ceramic and steel. The shape of the ship in the title is sug­gestive of the female body, and onboard are an astronaut, the astronaut’s mother, a teenage boy, and the head of a dog.

Sławomir Elsner, Julian Stańczak
TWO LIGHTS

Two Lights is a jour­ney into a world of visual sen­sations. Abs­tract works by Elsner and Stańczak, shown together for the first time, draw viewers in with their spec­tacular sur­faces, resul­ting from a com­plex and time-​consuming pain­ting process.

Slavs and Tatars
SIMURGH SELF-HELP

Slavs and Tatars’ new exhibition at Raster Gal­lery débuts work from Simurgh Self-​Help, the collective’s first new cycle of work since Pickle Politics (2016-2023) which was originally laun­ched on the occasion of the artists’ last exhibition at Raster in 2016.

CONSTELLATIONS

Since the birth of photography, it has remained in a loving embrace with its older kis­sing cousin, pain­ting. They serve each other, inspire each other, and swap roles. But this intimate relation­ship car­ries a whiff of shame, as the lovers don’t like to appear in public together. The exhibition Con­stel­lations tries to break this taboo.

Przemysław Matecki
GALAXY

Galaxy is a refreshing col­lec­tion of new and super-​new pain­tings by Przemysław Matecki. His pain­terly cosmos con­stan­tly draws energy from the ten­sion between light and dark­ness. This is pain­ting that appears on the sur­face to be full of con­tradic­tions, the main one being the com­bination of thick paint textures with flat photographic images cut out of magazines and catalogues. 

Michał Budny
INFLORESCENCE

Michał Budny’s art grows and matures with each new exhibition. The cur­rent show draws its drama direc­tly from the aura of the garden. The post-​minimalism which the artist has been faith­ful to from the start now takes on sur­prisin­gly vital forms.

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.

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.

ALL THE SUNS

Summer ticks by slowly at the gal­lery. The sun circ­les the garden and the display room in a wide arc, lazily flic­king its long tongue.

Zbigniew Rogalski
HOMESICK

Rogalski’s pain­tings movin­gly com­bine formal inven­tion and finesse with a lyrical mes­sage. They are in them­selves an intuitive, spiral­ling jour­ney into the depths, where the image even­tually fades but curiosity remains alive.

Paulina Stasik
STONES

On 22 April, we cor­dially invite you to the opening of a show of new works by Paulina Stasik at Raster Gal­lery. In her latest pain­tings and drawings, the artist creates a cosmological map of her own imagination, calls forth images of androgynous bodies, and metaphorically examines their metabolism. The figurative scenes allude to archetypes and myths inscribed in the spiritual, biological and sexual iden­tity of the body.

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.

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.

Karolina Jabłońska
COLD

Chill. Cold prevails out­side. Snow has even fallen, and when we open our lips, our breath turns into clouds of fog, quic­kly rising in the wintry air. When it blows harder, locks of hair stick to the face. Snow­flakes fall over the head, hair, eyebrows, and then slowly melt under the fading body heat.

Emilia Kina
LE SOIR QUI TOMBE

Does a pain­ting con­ceal more than it reveals? Emilia Kina examines the nature of pain­tings, the illusion imbed­ded in them, but also their physical con­struc­tion. „Le soir qui tombe” is the title of a pain­ting by the Bel­gian sur­realist René Magritte, which has now inspired Kina to create a multi-​phase pain­terly narrative.

RASTER SCULPTURE GARDEN

This year we are thril­led to present works of Olaf Brzeski, Michal Budny and Dominika Olszowy accom­panied by two special Ukrainian guests –
Yuriy Biley and Mar­haryta Rieznik.

Oskar Dawicki
MEN

This new project by Oskar Dawicki com­bines elements of per­for­mance and photography and is per­meated, as is a number of previous works of the artist’s, by the mood of existen­tial sorrow. The series of photographs prompts a reflec­tion on the role and position of traditional masculinity. To be a man is today – as the work visually argues – a chal­len­ging task, and a con­dition sub­ject to extreme pressure.

200 REVELATIONS

The new exhibition is devoted to the grey areas of the imagination—religious fervour and visions arising from an excess of metaphysical stimuli or, on the con­trary, from a scar­city of such stimuli and a lon­ging for spirituality in a world dominated by the economics of everyday pragmatism.

Aneta Grzeszykowska
WAVE

In her latest exhibition, Grzeszykow­ska returns to her first work, Album (2005), which serves as a kind of creed for the artist, com­prising photographs with an erased image of the artist. The new Album is a con­tinuation the history of her life, from the birth of her daugh­ter Franciszka.

THE LAST ONE TURN OUT THE LIGHTS
2ND PHOTOGRAPHY SALON

Photography depends on light, and without it images are extin­guished. This simple rule of physics also car­ries a metaphorical sense. How to cope without illuminated per­spec­tives and a clear vision of the future? The theme of the second edition of the Photography Salon at Raster Gal­lery is “exhaustion”, in both a photographic and a human […]

Edward Dwurnik
PINES

Not tulips. Pines. The work of Edward Dwur­nik still abounds in unfamiliar views and mysterious groves. For example Polish Pines, growing in a tight ring on a broad, undulating meadow, their crowns against the back­ground of a fading, dark-​blue sky. The exhibition was prepared in cooperation with the Edward Dwur­nik Foundation.

Marcin Maciejowski
POLISH ENVIRONS

For this year’s edition of the Warsaw Gal­lery Week­end, we have prepared an individual exhibition of Marcin Maciejow­ski, a distin­guished pain­ter who recovers Raphael’s ‘Portrait of a Young Man’, stolen by the Nazis, but he also polemicizes with the con­servative, statist model of ‘national heritage and sport’ which now forms part of Poland’s ministry of culture.

SCULPTURE GARDEN

(Polski) W ramach pierw­szej edycji rastrowego Parku rzeźby prezen­tujemy program łączący działania per­for­matywne z tradycyj­nymi obiek­tami rzeźbiarskimi. Wśród zaproszonych artystów znajdują się między innymi Dominika Olszowy, Oskar Dawicki i kolek­tyw Slavs and Tatars.

ICE SAINTS

Fulfilling the long-​held dream of a garden in the gal­lery, we invite visitors to a meadow where wild­flowers mingle with weeds, day with night, art with the memory of art. At the exhibition can be seen works by Michał Budny, Oskar Dawicki, Edward Dwur­nik, Milena Korol­czuk, Przemysław Kwiek, Marcin Maciejow­ski, Przemysław Matecki, Bartek Materka, Cyryl Polaczek, Zbigniew Rogal­ski, Łukasz Rusz­nica, Maria Szkop.

OD PODSZEWKI. SOFT MATTERS

The exhibition of Aneta Grzeszykow­ska, Zina Isupova, Karolina Jabłońska, Emilia Kina, Małgorzata Mirga-​Tas, and Michelle Raw­lings. The exhibition looks at the other side of the images and reveals the for­got­ten physical and func­tional qualities of the canvas and the original role of the fabric — the material from which clothes are made.

FRIEND OF A FRIEND

In the third Warsaw edition of the Friend of a Friend project, Galeria Raster, along with The Breeder from Athens and Sophie Tap­peiner from Vienna, is presen­ting an exhibition con­fron­ting the nature of pain and discomfort.

Paulina Stasik
PROTECTRESSES

Stasik’s pain­tings essay a return to a lost, supra-​sexual unity. The guides along this path are the caretakers from the title: female figures of shamans, seducers and syrens. The exhibition Protec­tres­ses is the first individual presen­tation of the artist’s works in Warsaw.

Olaf Brzeski
ADVENTURE

Adventure is a story full of per­sonal experien­ces, ruminations on love and death, joy and loss, as well as small but meaning­ful sen­sations, like the pleasure from a complement.

TR Warszawa
MARIA KLASSENBERG

“Maria Klassenberg” is a performance-installation-exhibition, built around the biography and work of Maria Klas­sen­berg, a for­got­ten figure of con­tem­porary art. The exhibition accom­panying the per­for­mance presents the archives of Klas­sen­berg prepared by Aneta Grzeszykow­ska in cooperation with Jan Smaga.

Karolina Jabłońska, Sophie Thun
ROOM TOUR

The heroine of the works of Karolina Jabłońska and Sophie Thun is a young woman, an artist seeking per­sonal liberation and empower­ment in art. Room Tour is an exhibitionist inspec­tion of the space in which she creates. A room of one’s own, once a symbol of creative eman­cipation, now becomes a space of loneliness and melan­choly in the time of the pan­demic and the social isolation it has imposed.

Dominika Olszowy
YAWN OF A SLEEPY HEART

Dominika Olszowy takes part in the second edition of the bien­nial in Riga. Her project con­sists of two parts presen­ted in the Latvian capital and an instal­lation prepared at Raster.

Janek Simon
MACHINE LEARNING FOLKLORE

The latest exhibition by Janek Simon at Raster has an open struc­ture. Instead of a traditional, arran­ged showing of com­pleted artistic objects, we are given a process, a situation sug­gesting a visit to the studio, where we can observe “live” the chan­ging progress of work on each project.

Edward Dwurnik
MOJŻESZ AND OTHERS FROM RYPIN

The presen­tation of ten of Edward Dwurnik’s works on paper never shown before marks the begin­ning of the work on an intriguing archive of the artist, in which motifs and stories known from pain­tings are developed, or the reverse—drawings left by the artist inc­lude ideas and emotions later expan­ded on in his paintings.

Emilia Kina
SCREEN

Emilia Kina focuses on the mar­gins of depic­tion, of what is merely a frame for the proper view, what hides it or merely appears. Her relief com­positions, painting/screens cap­tivating in their material beauty, divert atten­tion from the digital inflation of images and messages.

Krzysztof Zieliński
HOMETOWN

Wąbrzeźno, an ordinary little town star­ting with W, down near the end of the alphabet, in a lan­guage where “w” could stand for wszędzie—anywhere, por­trayed by the photographer after a decade of sys­temic chan­ges up to the eve of Poland’s joining the European Union, became a visual synonym for the creeping trans­for­mation. Wor­king on colour negatives and alluding to the minimalist poetics of topographic photography, Zieliński created an image of the post-​socialist coun­tryside that is the first of its kind, moving and empathetic, con­struc­ted from mist and a thousand and one shades of grey.

Michał Budny, Kajetan Sosnowski
EQUIVALENT ARRANGEMENT

At the joint exhibition Equivalent Arran­gement Michał Budny and Kajetan Sosnow­ski meet for the first time. The works of both artists, seemin­gly abs­tract, in various ways defy easy clas­sifications of genre. They operate through images and masses but use little pain­ting or sculp­ting. Their com­positions generally finds its origins in an abs­tract drawing—noted on paper or only conceptualized—as a type of minimalist score, the sim­plest recor­ding of an idea.

Michał Budny
NEITHER

The show “Neither” is Budny’s latest radical statement, this time with a vector aiming upwards, “into space, far from ear­thly con­cerns and triviality, from the quotidian and everything that weighs us down and detracts us from what is important.”

Lev Povzner
FIELD OF MIRACLES

Joint exhibition of Galeria Dawid Radziszew­ski and Raster Gal­lery is the first-​ever in Poland for Lev Povzner, a pain­ter from the movement of Rus­sian non­con­for­mists. He works in his own flat and uses domestic materials. Povzner’s elaborate, individual brand of sur­realism represents a return to the political poten­tial of the genre. At this exhibition we present a selec­tion of his newest works.

Dominika Olszowy
HOUSEHOLD SPIRIT

This exhibition designed especially for the Raster space peers out from a dark lining of domesticity. Using hybrid objects and sculp­tures, distur­bing images and mysterious pas­sages, Olszowy creates her own vision of home.

Aneta Grzeszykowska
MAMA

“Mama” is the latest series of photographs by Aneta Grzeszykow­ska, who presents her daugh­ter in the activities with silicone sculpture-​doll – a hyper-​realistic image of the head and body of her mother-​artist.

Edward Dwurnik
GATHERING IN THE SQUARE

(Polski) Ser­decz­nie zapraszamy na wystawę inaugurującą stałą reprezentację spuścizny Edwarda Dwur­nika przez galerię Raster. Wystawa przy­gotowana została we współpracy z Fundacją Edwarda Dwur­nika, założoną przez spad­kobierców artysty.

FRIEND OF A FRIEND

In the 2nd edition of the Friend of a Friend project, Galeria Raster invites you to an encoun­ter of three artists from three con­tinents: Flo Kasearu from Estonia, Sachiko  Kazama from Japan, and Michelle Raw­lings from the United States. Each of them works in a dif­ferent medium and cul­tural con­text, employing an individual, expres­sive lan­guage. In varying ways, all of them negotiate the social and political dimen­sions of artistic work.

Rafał Bujnowski, Peter Puklus, Zofia Rydet
1000 HANDS

Metaphorically and seasonally, the exhibition 1000 Hands suits the climate of the pre-​spring thaw, illuminating a land­scape of exhaustion and approaching, intuitively sensed change. In Polish literature this metaphor car­ries a political dimen­sion. In the works shown together here by Rafał Buj­now­ski (1974–), Peter Puklus (1980–) and Zofia Rydet (1911–1997), what is vital is the very process of trans­for­mation, and the accom­panying ambivalence, the tem­perature of inter­per­sonal relations and the poten­tial of the human hands from the title.

Karolina Jabłońska
SLIPPERY

“Slippery” at Raster is Karolina Jabłońska’s first individual show in Warsaw. In her pain­tings girls wear rings and guys wear wat­ches, but the stereo­typical logic of dominance is rever­sed. The heroines here are idols, sooth­sayers and thieves, and relation­ships and pas­sions explode as violen­tly as they end, in emotion. Here exag­geration and hyper­bole are the rule for both com­position and life.

Rafał Bujnowski, Michelle Rawlings
FORMY

Joint exhibition of Rafał Buj­now­ski and Michelle Raw­lings is organized by Raster in Tokyo’s Shibuya Hikarie

If I Were the Moon

The post-​romantic figure of the drun­ken artist is fading into the past, leaving behind a land­scape lit­tered with hal­lucinations, depravity, and shat­tered illusions. This is the story of the intimate ties between con­tem­porary art and vodka. Con­ceived as a medley of artworks and documen­tary con­tent, the exhibition features Krzysztof M. Bed­nar­ski, Olaf Brzeski, Michał Budny, Rafał Buj­now­ski, Oskar Dawicki, Edward Dwur­nik, Władysław Hasior, Jerzy Lewczyński, Honorata Martin, Dominika Olszowy, Zbigniew Rogal­ski, Wil­helm Sasnal, and others.

CONDO UNIT

Raster is among nine renow­ned gal­leries from Europe and Middle East to take part in the Condo Unit show in Athens.

ORNO. Luźne wątki

W ramach kolej­nej odsłony cyklu ORNO, dedykowanego spółdzielni jubiler­skiej, która przez kilkadziesiąt lat użytkowała lokal przy Wspólnej 63 – obecną siedzibę Rastra – prezen­tujemy prace współczesnych artystów wykorzystujące tkaninę – materię ściśle związaną z tzw. sztuką użytkową.

Nobuyoshi Araki, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Eva Koťátková
FOREIGN BODIES

Contemporary visual cul­ture treats the body as a plastic material that can be formed, shaped, distor­ted and defor­med as needed or desired. The images gathered for our exhibition are a special col­lec­tion of such bodies sub­jec­ted to various treat­ments and forms of sub­duing and con­trol­ling the body.
The cosmetic masks photographed by Grzeszykow­ska effec­tively reshape the artist’s face. The school les­sons in anatomy in Koťátková’s col­lages results in decon­struc­tion of the holistic unity of body and psyche. Araki’s nudes fran­kly address sexual prac­tices groun­ded in domination.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aneta Grzeszykowska, Zofia Rydet
HEAD, SKIN, FACE

The fabric of the skin, wrin­kles, hand gestures. The joint exhibition of works by Zofia Rydet (1911–1997) and Aneta Grzeszykow­ska (born 1974) is a show of two artists who use the camera to con­struct cap­tivating and rhetorically rich images of the female body.

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.

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.

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.

Peter Puklus
THE EPIC LOVE STORY OF A WARRIOR

“The Epic Love Story of a War­rior – A Trilogy and Epilogue” fol­lows the events and con­flicts of the 20th cen­tury seen through the eyes of a Cen­tral and Eastern European family but told through a fic­titious story based on actual events, just trans­for­med by an associative process.

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.

Photography as a Crime Scene

A special auc­tion of photography will be held at Raster on May 12, 2016, to sup­port the Jerzy Lewczyński Institute and Raster’s publishing activity.

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.

The Footballer’s Wife

Premiere of the Mister D. music video direc­ted and designed by Maria Strzelecka accom­panied by an exposition of the intricate set used in the clip.

ACTIVITIES WITH FAMILY

In what way does the family life of artists merge into their art? Star­ting with the total prac­tice of KwieKulik, a pair of artists who introduced their own child and other relatives into their poetic-​structural “activities with a camera” in the 1970s, we take a look at how family ties and relations are tested in the public forum through the medium of art. So, does art work to create distance, or, conver­sely, does it con­tribute to a deeper under­stan­ding, empathy and unraveling of familial tensions?

Michał Budny
CROWN

When con­sidering Budny’s works, one is con­sisten­tly awed by the noble, sub­dued power packed into those simple, natural gestures, materials and forms. The latest exhibition develops the fun­damen­tal themes within the prac­tice of this extraor­dinary artist in a new way—struggling with the material and the space, the emotions and the architec­ture. “Crown” is an exac­ting com­position of individual objects that cor­respond and, in turn, provoke one another. They are all con­nec­ted through a striking manifestational quality, precision and uncom­promising character.

BRZESKI GRZESZYKOWSKA KOROLCZUK KWIEKULIK MILACH

New editions by Brzeski, Grzeszykow­ska, Korol­czuk, KwieKulik and Milach

Olaf Brzeski
MEGALOMANIA

The disrup­tion of scale and weight, the fan­ciful use of material, the trans­ference of drawing into the physical space and an obses­sive imagination that revolves around the human figure—these are the stan­dard elements of Brzeski’s craft. “Megalomania” exhibition is a sculp­tural study of size, ambition and fragility – in which the artist will face off with figures and materials that appear in various ways hyper­bolic or imagined even.

Laurie Kang
THE C IS ALWAYS COMING

Unfixed and unproces­sed photographic paper marked by com­min­gling dar­kroom chemicals remains con­tinually sen­sitive to light and environ­ment. Their images depict distor­ted impres­sions of ambiguous figures, a roving mul­tiplicitous form. Aluminum sculp­tures inter­rupt. Sur­faces are skins and bodies dan­cing to betray fixity, the in between the only constant.

ORNO 2015: WARSAW, CITY OF CRAFTSMEN

The site of today’s Raster gal­lery for­merly housed the flag­ship store, studio and work­shop of the ORNO Cooperative of Artistic Han­diwork. Drawing upon this legacy, the rem­nants of which are still embed­ded in the façade, the gal­lery is hosting an exhibition devoted to the legacy of craft­sman­ship in Warsaw.

Michelle Rawlings
A GENTLE CREATURE

Relatively small in size, Michelle Rawlings’ pain­tings come together as a sequence of images, much like a blog or instagram feed. Raw­lings referen­ces various styles and genres of pain­ting, adap­ting them to her individual scale and nar­rative. The realm of her visual pur­suits is in large part focused on represen­tations of young women and girls – artists, actors and models – as well as the formal lan­guage of con­tem­porary art.

Janek Simon
PEOPLE WITH THE HEADS OF DOGS

Simon’s many exotic trips over the past dozen years have served to develop his para-​artistic endeavors, vested on the frin­ges of economics, art and post-​colonial thought. His newest exhibition is an offshoot of these ear­lier experien­ces, as it also inverts the per­spec­tive of the artist as observer. Simon’s main topic of interest shifts from inter­cul­tural exchange towards the sub­jec­tive observations of a researcher-​traveler: exploration, and con­fabulation, too, of which the experien­ces of recognized travelers, repor­ters and artists are full of.

Sławomir Elsner, Zbigniew Rogalski
VIEW FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE EYE

A joint exhibition by Sławomir Elsner and Zbigniew Rogal­ski reveals images that customarily only artists are privy to – inside the studio and across land­scapes viewed from the depth’s of the painter’s eye. Each of these artists is fascinated by the conven­tions and the ethereal aspect of pain­ting, while the works on show also exhibit a self-​reflection on the typicality of the space in which art is created, and on the delusory nature of mankind’s visual apparatus.

Błażej Pindor
PAŁAC LX

In the 60 years since the erec­tion of Warsaw’s Palace of Cul­ture and Science, this peculiar architec­tural struc­ture remains an impenetrable aesthetic phenomenon. Błażej Pindor’s photography project is the first ear­nest attempt at an artistic inter­pretation of the space within and around the Palace. The essence of his photography is an analysis of the impact the struc­ture has on the viewer – dominating, rescaled, sel­fish and opulent beyond measure, at the same time raw and seductive.

Jan Tomza-Osiecki
ISPC

Jan Tomza-​Osiecki is part of a generation for whom the inten­sive experience of vir­tual reality – via new media, the Inter­net, simple program­ming lan­guages, gaming, and 3D graphics and design – is key to creating works of art. His point of depar­ture is the abs­tract sculp­tural form, which he animates through the introduc­tion of sound, endowing it with real­ness and dynamism; the func­tioning of his interac­tive objects is based on a feed­back effect, which is typically con­sidered undesirable among engineers. The noisome issue of feed­back is now at the heart of the object’s pur­pose, opening up the field of experimen­tation and creating possibilities for gaining a new under­stan­ding for familiar spaces and the movement’s of one’s own body.

VILLA TORONTO

A roving art event that moves from city to city every couple of years, the VILLA project works with inter­national art gal­leries to create a tem­porary, ongoing art com­munity. This January VILLA touches down in Toronto to present an exhibition of con­tem­porary art at Union Station.

ALUMINUM SONG

The exhibition explores the lyrical and political proper­ties of matter that co-​created cer­tain legends of industry – and its demise. Aluminum – a ligh­tweight, non-​corrosive metal – appears in a range of forms, both as an artistic medium and an industrial material, a ready-​made of sorts. Its artistic legacy is intrin­sically con­nec­ted to the idea of deper­sonalizing the act of creation.

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.

Marcin Maciejowski
COMPOSITION FOR A SMALL SPACE

This exhibition of Marcin Maciejowski’s latest work is a mature and sophisticated pain­terly study of com­positions – of how com­binations of forms, colors, people, situations, and behavior enter into mutual relation­ships and generate the con­tent of a life.

Lukáš Jasanský, Martin Polák
TRUE AND CLEAR PHOTOGRAPHY

(Polski) Wystawa prezen­tuje fotografie dwójki pra­skich artystów – Lukáša Jasanský i Mar­tina Poláka – którzy od 1985 roku wspólnie testują konwencjonalność medium fotograficz­nego. Ich prace czerpią zarówno z tradycji sztuki kon­cep­tual­nej jak i klasycz­nej fotografii studyj­nej, krajobrazowej czy ulicz­nej, nie­zmien­nie przy tym uwodząc sub­tel­nym poczuciem humoru. Ludzie podglądani na ulicy i staran­nie kom­ponowane, choć bardzo codzienne martwe natury – zwyczajność staje się tu przed­miotem wysmakowanej gry. Prowadzi ona do zaskakujących, estetycz­nych przygód, ale i bar­dziej general­nej reflek­sji na temat istoty fotografii, jej relacji do rzeczywistości, funk­cji dokumen­tal­nej i kreacyjnej.

Cipedrapskuad, Honorata Martin, Dorota Masłowska, Maria Toboła
SOCIETY IS MEAN

This exhibition takes place in a coun­try whose society has a rather poor opinion of itself. The society is mean, the society is aging, and the force which is driving us toward all this is the progres­sive stabilization, which seems to have effec­tively conquered us after years of figh­ting on various fronts. Life in Poland has become ter­rifyin­gly ordinary. The works making up the Society Is Mean exhibition are not essen­tially asocial, but they do bril­lian­tly render the distance between the individual and the society around him or her. The artists whose works we are presen­ting give us a wholesale revision of this con­sen­sus; the sphere of their con­fron­tation with society is its lan­guage, its living space, and its dominant, stereo­typical inter­per­sonal relationships.

Olaf Brzeski
AT HEART

We are pleased to announce that from now on, Olaf Brzeski will be one of Raster’s represen­ted artists. His first solo show at the gal­lery, entitled ‘At Heart’, will feature only one artwork – an extreme test of the sculp­tural genre, as well as a charac­teristic figure of the impos­sible, both lyrical and oppres­sive all at once.

Oskar Dawicki
ONE PIECE TOO LITTLE

One Piece Too Little is a treatise on the essen­tial nature of creativity. Dawicki raises the question of where the limits of spec­tacle are set with regard to art and to life – of the dif­ference between a show and one’s destiny, between represen­tation and recreation, between a work of art and its profanation.

Przemek Matecki
WIDZIADŁO

The star­ting point for the exhibition were works made by Matecki in col­laboration with other artists: Tomasz Ciecier­ski, Zbigniew Rogal­ski and Paweł Susid.

Milena Korolczuk
BLUE BIRD

Raster presents the first solo show of works by Milena Korol­czuk (born 1984), an artist originally from Zabłudów, near Białystok in the north-​east of Poland who resides today in Oakland, Califor­nia. Her films and photographs seduce the viewer with their uncanny clarity and maturity. At once emotional and serene, they com­pose a striking and highly charac­teristic por­trait of a new generation of artists.

Rafał Bujnowski
ARSONISTS

Rafał Bujnowski’s newest pain­tings are set in the dark of night. The artist, with his charac­teristic reticence and precision, con­structs pain­tings using the most basic means – black paint and white chalk.

Diament, Elsner, Krenz, Nuur
IT WASN’T THERE YESTERDAY

This exhibition is an examination of the con­tem­porary poten­tial of abs­trac­tion – both in life and in art. Through a range of exam­ples across a variety of genres, we observe the ten­sion that is created between objects and materials that are familiar to us from our everyday lives and the lan­guage of abstraction.

Zbigniew Libera
NEW HISTORIES

Libera illustrates the presen­timents and fears that arise in our con­siderations of what the future has to hold.

Slavs and Tatars
TOO MUCH TŁUMACZ

Slavs and Tatars’ first solo show in Warsaw takes on the per­for­mative use of language.

ARAKAWA HIRATA OKUMURA TANAKA

The exhibition takes its cue from an intense period of artistic and political activity at the end of the 1950s in Japan.

Anega Grzeszykowska, Jan Smaga
PRIVATE ARCHIVE

The exhibition is effec­tively the premiere of a col­lec­tive project by Aneta Grzeszykow­ska and Jan Smaga that has been con­ceived in paral­lel to each artist’s individual projects over the past few years.

Michał Budny
ŻYWICA

Much like his ear­lier works, Budny’s ‘Żywica’refers to the human presence. It drives and streng­thens our sen­sibility towards the architec­ture sur­roun­ding us.

Johanna Billing, Milena Korolczuk, Michał Wasążnik
IN MY YOUTH UNSATED

The exhibition is a jour­ney in time and space, a trip to the East, taken to the rhythm of music.