Uwaga, ZŁO! ZŁOrzeczy. Galeria Stolarnia, Instytut Historii Sztuki UWr (11–18 I 2014)
Attention, EVIL! EVIL. Stolarnia Gallery, Institute of Art History, University of Wrocław (11–18 January 2014)

Summary/Abstract: The exhibition was prepared by the graduates and students of the Wrocław Academy of Art and Design. The group of eighteen people discussed in various ways the up-to-date issues of evil. Their undertaking matched perfectly with the specifics of Carpentry Shop Gallery. Its desolate interior hosted works that dealt with such issues as consumptionism that becomes a new religion or dialectical and relative character of good and evil. We could also see a distopian vision of Earth, which will be settled down by bacteria or transgenic mutants covered with plastic. Many of the exhibited works showed an attempt at tackling post-communist zombies, struggling with dead and scary, both material, habitual and spiritual heritage of the late generations. Its oppressiveness evoking neuroses and inner conflicts of “the grown-up world” cause doubts and rebellion, which eventually taken a shape of a “light” exposition without critical sanctimony. Humour and joke appear to be rescue for nightmares of reality, and the young artists’ sense of the space accentuated their extreme sensitivity to non-artistic context.Will the generation, whose conscious life coincide with the period of the Third Polish Republic, succeed in surviving post humanist crisis and creating new kind of community? By applying a wide range of techniques – from illusionist painting, through minimal object, to postmodern détournement – the artists from Wrocław have shown that their method is the rejection of any artistic and ideological fundamentalism. It actually is a strategy of their patron being a dog, which used to be placed at the very bottom of a social hierarchy only to find itself glorified as a man’s best friend and protector. This might be an effective formula of a contemporary artist who appears to be a precarious one.

• Details
• Contents