Monika Sosnowska, Marek Szczęsny and Karolina Wiktor, Selected by Andrzej Turowski: La déchirure (Tear)

It is my pleasure to invite you to Atlas Sztuki for an exhibition entitled La déchirure, devised by Professor Andrzej Turowski. Although we have known each other for years, this will be Professor Turowski’s curatorial debut at our gallery.
In the past, he contributed essays commenting on exhibitions presented at Atlas Sztuki, and in 2012 he appeared in what was then a new role for him: that of an artist.
At the time, our exhibition space hosted an installation by Andrzej Turowski and Anna Baumgart related to two of their artistic projects: Anna Baumgart’s film Conquerors of the Sun and Andrzej Turowski’s book The Locomotive of History, which combines historical study with a work of science fiction containing elements of a thriller.

In his latest exhibition, Professor Turowski addresses the concept of rupture in art. In the curatorial essay accompanying the exhibition, he sets out the intellectual context and historical development of the idea. In preparing La déchirure, the curator invited three artists to collaborate: Monika Sosnowska, Marek Szczęsny and Karolina Wiktor. He explained his reasons for inviting Marek Szczęsny as follows: “I had known Marek Szczęsny’s work for years. (…) For years I have observed his ‘struggle with form’: his search for a gesture that will ‘construct the painting’; his return to a surface that can be ‘saturated with form and meaning’. I do not always accompany him in this, nor do I always agree with him. I nevertheless believe that he is one of those artists for whom form has its own metaphysics, and for whom art strives to find that final crack beyond which nothing remains.” As the curator writes in his essay, the invitation to Monika Sosnowska arose in part from his interest in her project Tower: “The project interested me all the more because the tower had been the subject of many of my own studies. I treated the biblical story of the Tower of Babel as one of the topoi of the ‘builders of the world’ — the avant-garde artists who believed in its construction while simultaneously anticipating the coming catastrophe. In my view, the tower’s dark labyrinth was not the antithesis of joyful construction: it was embedded within it, the dark side of the same work. It threatened its structural cohesion, its rational totality, its universal unity.” Andrzej Turowski writes of Karolina Wiktor’s participation in the exhibition: “I knew her earlier works, dating from the period when she created radical performances with Aleksandra Kubiak, but she later disappeared from my view. A television interview in 2014 told me about her stroke, illness and aphasia. I became interested in the blog in which she wrote about aphasia, her book Volga through Aphasia, and her exhibition at Zachęta, where she presented her aphasic writing and aphasic territory with biographical meticulousness; finally, I reached the proceedings of a conference on culture and neuroscience organised by the artist. By then I was already working on the Łódź exhibition and, although at first sight everything seemed to distinguish Wiktor’s work from that of Szczęsny and Sosnowska, I became interested in the deeper affinities between these artists. These concerned the explicit references in Wiktor’s work to the stylistic language of the Constructivist avant-garde (Sosnowska drew on modernist architecture, Szczęsny on the modernist canvas), as well as to the modern formalism of Russian theorists and artists who played a decisive role in defining the idea of the ‘pure image’, deeply rooted in the art of the first half of the twentieth century. In Wiktor’s works, I discerned attempts to deconstruct this paradigm on the grounds of contemporary neo-formalism and, at the same time, to question the perfection of the linguistic (sign) system by replacing its structuralist completeness with its constitutive rupture.”

I was delighted by this choice of artists. Monika Sosnowska, an artist of international renown, rarely shows her work in Poland; Marek Szczęsny’s work is not widely known to Polish audiences; and Karolina Wiktor, who has worked with visual poetry for several years, remains somewhat outside the artistic mainstream. Professor Andrzej Turowski has devised a compelling exhibition featuring artists who appear only infrequently in Polish galleries.

Alongside Andrzej Turowski’s curatorial essay mentioned above, I recommend the essays on the individual artists written by Gabriela Świtek, Małgorzata Sady and Łukasz Musielak.
I warmly invite you to visit Atlas Sztuki. Professor Andrzej Turowski’s curatorial project is well worth engaging with.