EXHIBITIONS – wanda gallery

At the Crash Club event, we will be presenting the works of Weronika Wysocka and Oskar Pawełko.

CRASH CLUB is an inclusive and social exhibition project that invited galleries to transcend the confines of their usual spaces by extending their exhibitions into one big group show during the Warsaw Gallery Weekend. CRASH CLUB features local and non-local galleries, artist-run-spaces, and artists that are not represented by galleries in Warsaw, creating a context of intersection and encounter, or of crash and collision.

Dawid Radziszewski, Ewa Opałka, Fundacja Galerii Foksal, Galeria Le Guern, Gunia Nowik Gallery, HOS, Krupa Art Foundation, Łęctwo, Lescer Art Center, LETO, lokal_30, Monopol, Piana Gallery Foundation, Piktogram, Pola Magnetyczne, Polana Institute, Propaganda, Stereo, Suprainfinit Gallery, Galeria Szydłowski, Turnus, wanda, Śmierć Człowieka, Przyszła Niedoszła, Wschód, Raster, Ziemniaki Foundation

13th edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend is coming up – establishing its position as the biggest contemporary art preview in East-Central Europe. During this year’s programme, you’ll get to see the exhibitions of 35 galleries from Warsaw, Poznan, Gliwice and Cracow. As well as – artist talks, discussion panels, guided art walks and many more.

The exhibition by painter Ksenia Gryckiewicz and composer Antonina Nowacka is an empirical journey into the depths of the inner self, an attempt to find balance within oneself and in nature, a pursuit of delving as deeply as possible. The search of self sometimes revolves in circles, at times excessively rooted in surface consciousness, and at times sinking into a hypnotic state of reality assessment impossibility, generating images, invoking experiences, and memories absent upon awakening.

Gryckiewicz multiplies her image, changing perspectives like successive frames of a film, delving deeper from objective to subjective. Intuitively, she seeks duality, support in another person, and a connection with them, trying to constitute herself from the polyphony in introspection. The characters in the paintings seem to be trying to retreat to the Lacanian stade du miroir in order to start seeing themselves as a separate person anew through self-identification with their image. Inner dialogue sometimes leads to self-understanding, while other times it evokes a feeling of falling, as if transitioning from wakefulness to dreaming. Euphoria clashes with the destructive impossibility of making a choice.

In her practice, Nowacka realizes sound compositions using natural spaces with unusual auditory potential, including caves, grottoes, and open meadows. She uses the voice as an instrument and its correlation with mental states, internal and external phenomena. Nature actively participates in the artist’s actions, becoming a context or pretext for her work, sometimes even one of the characters. The composer translates her methodology from the realm of music into visual activities, venturing into another medium – photography – to portray flowers by abstracting and delving into their forms. In the relationship between the observer and the object of observation, she observes and reviews nature as a sphere of surreal narratives and unknown, fantastic worlds. She composes through the delicacy and transience of colorful forms.

The artists together created a music piece that is present in the exhibition space. The recording, made in the Rotunda of the Królikarnia building, is a kind of dialogue between the artists, an exchange of energy. They bring out the ritualistic nature of singing from the deepest areas for themselves, entering a state of trance in search of the most inaccessible points both in their nature, but also going far beyond it at times, together they shape the landscape of their worlds.

It remains to bow to the earth, listen, surrender to the resonating nature, and in peace, wait for oneself. To experience a state of equilibrium – to hear one’s own voice.

____

Filip Rybkowski’s (b. 1991) practice is based on painting, installation, video and photography. His works transcend the traditional boundaries of painting, entering the field of mosaic, objet trouvé and installation. Rybkowski combines the poetics of the fragment, juxtaposing original artefacts with reconstructions and images. He is interested in the problematic status of “authenticity” and the processes of a historical construction of memory. In his most recent projects, his basic tool is the critical act of reconstruction combined with reflection on the political nature of the gesture of restoration, preservation and conservation. He is a co-founder of the Piana Foundation and Piana Gallery, which support and promote young artists.

Każdy dzień tonę
w goryczy i smutku
bez ciebie i z tobą.
Mój ulubiony,
pęknięty flakonik
Schowany w kieszonce
Zawsze pod ręką, czasem przecieka
wyczuwalna rysa
spod opuszka palca

W nadziei wrócić do ciebie
Życie beztroskie, pełne miłości.
Każdy dzień tonę
w radości i z tobą.
W ciszy,
czekam aż wyciekniemy
przez wąską szczelinkę
w najgłębsze miejsce.
Nosze na sobie suknie
o zapachu
stłuczonego kryształu.

Każdą noc błyszcze
w światłe księżyca.
Odsłonięta skóra
pamięta dotyk.

W blasku światła świecy
kiedy przypadkiem strącisz
błyszczeć się będą kawałeczki szkła.

Austere modernist and industrial spaces. Among them there are figures—most of the time only partially visible, carrying out some uncertain tasks. We rarely get to see their faces, emotionless, covered by their hands, hat brim, or helmet edge.

Edna Baud composes her paintings out of film scenes and photos from her private archive. There are no real anecdotes behind them, yet still, as in Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Stills’, it’s hard not to get an impression that we know those scenes from somewhere. Raw realist images, painted in greyscale, pale green and purple tones, are composed in tight frames as if combing the film and stylized poster aesthetic. Figures rarely blend into the background, more often they are separated from it by a distinct outline. Their clothes, meticulously draped, are almost architectural, dissolving the boundary between scenery and costume. The space is based on flat planes as in a theater stage. Pictures broken down into separate elements prompt us to sharpen our eyes. Alienating effect strips away the illusion—we critically examine the images instead of allowing them to enchant or deceive us. Edna’s works follow the logic of montage, uncovering a whimsical and untamed stream of thought and associations.

‘To know, it is necessary to take position’, wrote Georges Didi-Huberman in ‘The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions’. Edna Baud’s works trigger that exact process—we take positions on them based on juxtaposed elements, our knowledge, afterimages of associations, apparent and repressed memories. We suspect what we’re seeing, even though the images contain scrappy information. The artist is not telling us a story, she allows us to reflect upon the way we tend to add our own stories to images. The way we interpret them is determined by subtle things—a hand gesture, delicate muscle tension, the way in which a braid or a knife is clutched in fingers. What makes us attribute certain intentions or gender identity to figures which we see only in small fragments? The artist is not admonishing us, she’s not giving any straight answers either. Instead, she provokes us to confront our own, intuitively taken positions.

At a first glance there comes a calming feeling. We know this language; we know how to read it. Plain, almost illustration-like figurative painting seems like a manifestation of a ubiquitous phenomenon that could be summed up in a phrase ‘no thoughts, just vibes’. It’s everywhere, from TikTok to lofi music, offering a simple and wide interpretive framework for our feelings. However, Olga Krykun is one of the few artists that approaches this visual language with a critical attitude, instead of adopting it as a neutral tool for ambiguous storytelling.

Faces without bodies, made up of eyes, noses, mouths and makeup marked with few precise brushstrokes fill up the entire canvases. These are the portraits distilled from digital self-portraits, seen thought the eyes of cameras and app filters. Olga Krykun strips them down to the anatomical bare minimum, but at the same time she gives them distinct features, as if she were to paint a psychological portrait off of a digital avatar. In her paintings she digs into the gap between the deep and the superficial, the portrait and the pictogram, exposing a dark underside of an aesthetic that feeds on glamorizing sadness. She develops this visual language further in the most recent pieces, made in the time of war. Krykun is reacting to it as person caught in between, Ukrainian-born artists living in Prague, connected with Odesa by family roots, but following the news just as many other Czech people do—through the phone screen. War in the Ukraine is a key subject in her most recent pieces, though the artist is not trying to create a pseudo-journalistic depiction of it, reflecting rather on her own position as an observer.

Can You Still Remember This Day? is a story of war seen through the eyes of an expat glued to a screen, a story about emotions and symbols circulating within the social media feeds. In recent paintings from Forget-me-nots series one of those symbols—the sunflower—keeps resurfacing. Krykun humanizes it, gives it a face and big watery eyes. These, however, are not images to raise people’s spirits. They could be deceptively sentimental, balancing on the edge between rigid and soft, strong and maudlin. Together, they form a self-reflective story of constructing our identity, and raise questions about the symbols themselves—what they mean and how we use them.

Olga Krykun (1994, Odesa, Ukraine) received her bachelor’s degree from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (Studio of Supermedia) and pursued her master’s degree in the Studio of Painting, which she received in 2021. In 2022 she became a holder of Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Olga Krykun uses diverse types of media in her art work, including mainly video, objects and painting, which she subsequently assembles to create complex installations. By combining elements of fictional narratives with references to real cultural and socially relevant symbols, she invents a self-contradicting mythology of our day-and-age. Her practice is strongly rooted in intuition, emotion and personal experience, the elements of which are approached with a distinct visual style and specific aesthetic, making her works reminiscent of surreal visions or a kind of dreamlike trance, resulting in a highly suggestive viewer experience.