calendario eventi  :: 

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12/2/2014

Four exhibitions

MOCAK - Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Krakow

Wladyslaw Hasior
13.02.2014 - 27.04.2014

Władysław Hasior’s exhibition at MOCAK will be the first such comprehensive Krakow presentation of the artist’s work in four decades. Hasior is one of the most prominent Polish artists. The MOCAK exhibition sets out to restore him to his rightful place in the art history of the 20th century. The audience will see some hundred works from 1956–1986, a number of which have never been shown before. The exhibition will also include film and photographic documentation from the 1960s, fragments of film by Grzegorz Dubowski and many other works. They will provide a backdrop to the presentation of an artist who in the 1970s and 80s was a Polish ‘export item’ but who, however, as a result of a less than favourable unfavourable reception in the art world, became for many years a somewhat forgotten figure.

Hasior has been compared to Robert Rauschenberg, one of the precursors of assemblage and pop art. Both artists employ ready-made elements, ‘symbolic deaths’ whose significance depends on various historic and social conditioning. The title of the exhibition, which some might find controversial, exposes the parallel inspirations of both artists. Both use symbols prevalent within their culture. With Hasior, these refer mainly to historic and patriotic issues; with Rauschenberg, they tend towards the mundane. In spite of the fact that both artists favoured a similar technique and both reached the peak of their creativity during the 1960s and 70s, Hasior was never to discover Rauschenberg’s work.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a presentation of photographs by Wojciech Plewiński, who, while preparing an interview for the weekly Przekrój (1960s), visited the artist and took a series of photographs in his studio.

Władysław Hasior (1928 – 1999) – sculptor, painter, stage designer and teacher. Artistic trouble-maker and rebel. He taught at the State Lycée of Artistic Technique in Zakopane and at the State College of Fine Arts in Wrocław, where he also worked as a stage designer for the Polski Theatre. A grant from the French Ministry of Culture enabled him to study in Ossip Zadkine’s studio in Paris. He was a member of Phases, an international group of artists and writers. He lived in Zakopane, where, in 1985, in the day sun-lounge of the Warszawianka Sanatorium he opened his gallery.
From the late 1950s, he used ready-mades or parts thereof to create numerous metaphorical assemblages; from the mid-60s, he went on to produce the pathetic and grotesque Banners. He carried out sculpture performances employing natural elements: winds, water and fire; he also made monumental sculptures, including Prometheus Shot Dead (Kuźnice 1964), Iron Organ (Snozka 1966), Golgotha (Montevideo 1969), Chariot of the Sun (Södertälje near Stockholm 1972–1976).
His works can be found in collections including the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museo de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, the National Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the national museums in Krakow, Poznań, Warsaw and Wrocław.

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Rune Eraker
Uprooted
14.02.2014 - 27.04.2014

curated by Delfina Jałowik

The exhibition is the first presentation in Poland of the works of the Norwegian photographer Rune Eraker and also the first exhibition of socially engaged photography at MOCAK. It consists of 73 black-and-white photographs from the series The Smell of Longing and two screenings that contain some photographs from the series never shown before.

The photographs presented at the exhibition have been taken since 1988. They document Eraker’s travels in 22 countries, ravished by war, political repression and hunger. They are an attempt to address the reasons why people are forced to abandon their roots and seek shelter abroad. Documenting everyday situations from the lives of the displaced against the backdrop of tragedy and war, the artist focuses on the causes of exile.

Rune Eraker (born 1961), a documentary photographer. Since 1990 a member of the photographic group Hollandse Hoogte. Heading the editing team of the magazine Norwegian Journal of Photography. In 2002, awarded by the USA Society for News Design for his series The Democratic Republic of Congo, and in 2009 he was named Freelancer of the Year in Norway.
Rune Eraker’s photographic series are firmly based in the aesthetics of classical European documentary photography. His works have appeared in numerous magazines all over the world.

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Wislawa Szymborska
Collages
13.02.2014 - 13.04.2014

curated by Maria Anna Potocka

Wisława Szymborska’s exhibition Collages aims to broaden the artistic perception of the Polish Nobel winner. The poet’s art covers three areas: serious poetry, light-hearted poetry and cut-and-paste works, or collages. These areas combine to define the artistic personality of Szymborska. While we by no means maintain that in each of these areas the artist excelled to the same degree, we do think that to interpret these areas separately results in arriving at a notion of Szymborska as a person that is both incomplete and, to a degree, untrue.

We present a huge collection of Collages, typically postcard-size. Nobody knows how many were made, but statistical calculations allow a likely estimate running into thousands. These minimalist compositions, created as part of a search for new, startling meanings, employ juxtapositions of images, and sometimes words. The result: formally economical, visual poems,

Last year, MOCAK presented the art of Jiří Kolář, an artist with an interest in a choice of media similar to that of Szymborska’s. The Czech artist first sought his medium of expression in poetry, then prose, and finally discovered collage which became dominant in his art. With Szymborska, there is a different hierarchy of importance; nevertheless, there is a different attempt at ‘expressing the whole of oneself’. With multilayer personalities, to limit oneself to just one form of expression may not suffice. This is the case even when the artist has the mastery of such a fine tool as Wisława Szymborska’s serious poetry.

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Alina Dawidowicz
The Whole World in Small Pictures
13.02.2014 - 13.04.2014

curated by Delfina Jałowik

At the exhibition we will present over two thousand miniature pictures by Alina Dawidowicz. These are watercolours or felt tip representation, which she started making in the 1980s at the rate of some 20 a week. Each picture has been glued onto cut-outs of coloured paper, that the artist happened to have to hand, such as envelopes, bits of cardboard or old leaflets and magazines.

In these images appear well-known places, images of saints, landscapes or ordinary people. Many representations have been sourced out of photographs, newspapers or art albums. In creating them, the artist was inspired by the desire to record the most interesting flashes of reality. Dawidowicz painted each scene twice, because, as she claimed, there were not enough interesting images in reality to go round. The spontaneous, sketches, drawn in haste, have the mannerisms of naïve painting.

Alina Dawidowicz (1918–2007) – the only daughter of Leon Chwistek, a painter and philosopher, a member of the Formist movement. Educated as a mathematician, for many years she held a post at the Krakow Polytechnic. An amateur painter since the early years. She only began to produce intensively her miniature paintings after retiring in the 1980s. She never sold her works, preferring to give them to her friends and family.

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Image: Wisława Szymborska, to Gizela Szancerowa, 1988, original postcard, MOCAK Archive

Press officer: Julita Kwaśniak
email: kwasniak@mocak.pl
tel. + 48 12 263 40 55

Opening date: 13.02.2014 at 6 pm

MOCAK - Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow
Lipowa 4 - Krakow
Tuesday – Sunday, 11 am – 7 pm.
Tuesdays – admission free! Free passes can be collected until 6 pm.
You can buy tickets on the spot Wednesday – Sunday, 11 am – 6 pm.

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