BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice

The exhibition Atelier at Legiony Piłsudskiego Street is a multi-layered presentation of working space established by an atomized community of five artists. The presentation involves literal, metaphorical and symbolic relocation of fragments from their real Kraków atelier to an imaginary, makeshift atelier in the BWA Gallery of Contemporary Art in Katowice. A historical point of reference is provided by Gustave Courbet's The Painter's Studio (1855), the full, meaningful title of which was Real Allegory, Representing a Phase of Seven Years of My Life as a Painter. The artwork, which was revolutionary at the time, in a way forms Courbet's abridged spiritual and physical biography.
Another, contemporary point of reference is an exhibition entitled In the Beginning Was Merz — From Kurt Schwitters to the Present Day, which was shown at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover ten years ago. Its focus was on the juxtaposition of Schwitter's (MERZ) works and documents against spatial constructions and reconstructions by a selection of contemporary artists, which emphasised an important aspect of art, that is the identity of the workspace and the artwork.
What the authors of this project actually had in mind was any architectural space that has been temporarily converted into working space.
While following, not very carefully though, these two reference points, and having left behind the issue of mediagenic and inter-mediagenic properties of contemporary art, we would like to create a certain scenery with objects and frozen events, a depiction of physical and mental space. It will be made up of literal quotes from our atelier (elements of its permanent architectural composition, some furniture, for example windows, beds, tables and chairs), placed in the authentic topographic relation to the artworks; collections of the already existing works juxtaposed against the new ones, which are actually their replicas, scaled and adapted for a new, different and bigger area; fragments of biographical documents that precisely determine our modus operandi in this very case; historical materials relating to our work in the Kraków atelier. Our aim is also to revise the status of certain phenomena, such as environment, installations, and assemblage by means of emphasising their picturesqueness and relations with landscape painting, rather than focusing on their autonomy or phenomenological concerns of their own. Therefore, the exhibition will be a kind of a staged arrangement of objects that are supposed to convey the spirit and the letter of our atelier — a place that has always housed objects of various morphology, scale and destiny.
Yet another, ambitious aspect of our project is an attempt to capture the moment that precedes the division of art into different fields. In other words, it refers to the origins of images — images that are in our minds, images of the primordial situation that, being dimension-free at first, takes place in a perfect area, inside our own minds.
Our three room atelier, which is already occupied by Ignacy Czwartos, Piotr Lutynski and Marek Chlanda, has also provided our other friends with a place to work, allowing us to prepare one long shared presentation. We decided that they had to be involved in our current project. Thanks to this, Koji Kamoji and Krzysztof Klimek have provided our considerations about the origins of images with a much wider perspective. It relates more to the emotionality of psyche and perception, which are not bound by an unconditional compulsion to fit into patterns of contemporary visual imagination. Our work is a part of this imagination, unquestionably, because we are children of our times; however, when we look at ourselves, we can clearly discern archaic components of our work. We hope our exhibition will stimulate the viewers to discover they also have these basic and, in our opinion, fundamental predispositions.

Marek Chlanda

• Financed by The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage

  

• Organizers