Ufo art gallery kraków

artists

Wonderful Line.
A sentimental Flight

Jadwiga Maziarska, Krzysztof Penderecki, Isa Schmidlehner
Adrian Buschmann, Gelatin, Ugo Rondinone
Barbara Mungenast, Josef Dabernig, Helmut Middendorf
Kornel Janczy, Iza Tarasewicz, Peter Fend
Marcin Maciejowski, Gerlind Zeilner, Wilhelm Sasnal
Dorota Buczkowska, Paweł Kowalewski, Georg Frauenschuh
Marzena Nowak, Rafał Bujnowski, Simon Wachsmuth
Michael Biber, Zuzanna Janin

Curated by: 

Goschka Gawlik

Photo: 

Szymon Sokołowski

Poster by: 

Isa Schmidlehner

05.05.2023 – 10.06.2023

UFO Art Gallery

installation views

Wonderful Line.
A sentimental Flight

We live in an era of diversity and confusion of different species, countries, languages, cultures, genders and of course values. The affinity of art forms such as fine arts, film, music, performance or dance makes it possible to cross borders or to abolish categories – this is lived experience in times of spectacle.

The exhibition Wonderful Line. A sentimental Flight bring together manifestations of different artistic positions. However, all participating artists share their reference to conceptual art. Their work is not limited to one medium as they create hybrid objects or sculptures, paintings, videos and performances simultaneously. However, all of them have an interest in the linear form, which they model with passion and transform with different means of expression. In her works, the line sometimes points to the limits of the real, sometimes connecting distant points, sometimes separating surfaces. Line clusters and line densities are also used to create idiosyncratic visual effects.

In the works shown in the exhibition, the lines can reflect the texture of the surface of bodies – literally – or refer to more ephemeral, abstract forms or phenomena with an uncertain ontological status. Based on Wassily Kandinsky’s 1926 book “Point and Line on the Surface”, the show confronts the works of visual artists with the unique modern notations of the composer Krzysztof Penderecki, in which enigmatic symbols or feverish zigzag lines appear instead of classical notes. Wonderful Line traces the resonance of musical score forms with the emotional equivalents of colour, sign and gesture in the visual arts, highlighting the unruly glow and inner vibrations of certain works.

A line of flight or a line of escape (French: ligne de fuite) is a concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their work Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It describes one out of three lines forming what Deleuze and Guattari call assemblages, and serves as a factor in an assemblage that ultimately allows it to change and adapt to said changes, which can be associated with new sociological, political and psychological factors. Translator Brian Massumi notes that in French, “Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no relation to flying.”

In the first chapter of the second volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project, A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the concept is used to define a “rhizome”.

Goschka Gawlik

About Wonderful Line.
A sentimental Flight

Artists

  • (1913 - 2003) belonged to the circle of the post-war – so-called second – Kraków Group. She participated in three Exhibitions of Modern Art (Krakow 1948-49, Warsaw 1957 and 1959). Although she did not escape the influences of Surrealism, she did not explore its mysteries at length. In practice, she was interested in the ‘matter painting’. She remained faithful to it until the end of her work in her biomorphic and thus trail-blazing formal solutions, which went far beyond the achievements of the local scene. The artist engaged in experiments related to enriching the texture of her paintings or the rhythmisation of her forms since 1946.

  • (1933-2020 in Krakow, Poland), the most famous post-war Polish composer, conductor, and pedagogue, whose output from the 1960s is classified as post-serial avant-garde music. The emotional effects of compositions from this period attracted the interest of many film directors worldwide, such as S. Kubrick, D. Lynch, and M. Scorsese. Penderecki was one of the first composers to use the technique of extracting sound by non-traditional means from traditional instruments, which came to be known as sonorism

  • The paintings of Isa Schmidlehner (born in 1971 in Vienna) are usually created under the impression of a moment and a sudden impulse. In her painting, the artist usually takes up mythological, archival, and biographical motifs, themes related to the history of art, as well as those that appear in everyday social media. Besides acrylics and oil, she uses stencils, sponge techniques, and collages in her paintings. Her paintings’ baroque musicality and somewhat boisterous exaltation of form and colour

  • (born in 1976 in Katowice) is a painter and illustrator. His paintings, including portraits, genre scenes, semiabstractions and figuration, exemplify a trend described by Texte zur Kunst as Artist for Artist, characterised by constant references to the work of other artists as role models.

  • is the name of an Austrian collective of four artists that has existed since 1993 and is therefore characterised by a particular longevity. Gelatin’s theatricalised happenings and their sculptural installations, which form the backdrop to the performances, are characterised by a powerful energy charge, allusions to Dada art, peculiar ‘ugly beauty,’ and charm lined with nudity.

  • Multimedia artist, a representative of post-conceptualism and author of highly acclaimed installations, has been breaking down the boundaries between different media and disciplines for more than thirty years. From 1986 to 1990, he studied at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Angewandte Kunst in Vienna from 1986 to 1990. Since 1990, he has lived in New York. The artwork of this renowned artist is often based on themes and motifs from everyday life, which acquire a poetic character through isolation, expansion, repetition, or specific treatment of the material.

  • (born in 1960 in Tyrol) has been working with the geometry of the circle for years. The circle or disk, an ancient symbol of perfection, an evocative ictus of the psychedelic sixties, and the symbol of the swirling void, a glorified Pop Art figure and the modernist ideal of ‘pure form’ undergoes further transformations in her work. She makes circular movements within a circle using a mechanical construction she had designed specifically for this purpose – a prosthetic extension of a hand which makes painterly gestures.

  • (born in 1956 in Carinthia), sculptor, draughtsman, and creator of minimalist installations of linear aluminium rasters, manually copying architectural treatises and a book on the milk diet with a blue pen on A5 format. At first glance, the artist’s pencil drawing from the late 1970s presented in the exhibition looks like a building or architectural blueprint. It is incredibly delicate and barely visible, but it gives the impression of being meticulous in the manner of rendering detailed measurements and proportions. It reflects the author’s love and passion for constructivist-rationalist measurement of reality and its orders.

  • (born in 1953, Germany) is one of Germany’s most famous New Wild Ones (Neue Wilde). Middendorf turned rock music into a visual experience. Similar dynamism and tension in the depiction of the motif, this time of the painter in front of the easel, characterises the drawing entitled Maler (translated as Painter) rendered in pencil and his favourite red. It shows an ascetic and, despite that, no less dynamic portrait of a young painter whose energy and invention literally burst from his eyes in front of the easel.

  • is interested in the planetary perspective in relation to contemporary human existence and nature. The artist works in painting and creates installations, usually consisting of many small objects that have the character of para-scientific models. He is interested both in visualising and contesting scientific theories (in which he comes close to Peter Fend). His work is stylistically associated with Postminimalism. Janczy often operates on a micro-scale, and his constructions most often resemble landscapes.

  • (born in 1981 in Białystok) weaves technical tools and materials with organic substances, incorporating technology into a dialogue with nature. In Tarasewicz’s world, everything gives the impression of movement, inscribing itself in the logic of permanent change. The artist does, however, devote a great deal of attention to the laws and regularities discovered by science – for example, in the DNA helixes, to which alludes in her hexagonal structures.

  • American artist Peter Fend (born in 1950 in Columbus, Ohio) represents a particular attitude, combining the qualities of a conceptual artist, entrepreneur, and activist in one. For the versatile Fend, it is not enough to represent the world and ask only artistic questions. Fend wants to shape the world actively, influencing politics like scientists or entrepreneurs. The artist has repeatedly proposed solving environmental problems by combining art, design, and engineering, incorporating state-of-the-art satellite technology.

  • (born in 1974 in Balice) began his artistic career similarly to Paweł Kowalewski – as part of a loose collective of five fellow painters. However, he started in the late 1990s in Krakow, and the collective was called Grupa Ładnie. In contrast to his older colleagues from the Gruppa, emotionally involved in painful national-religious issues, Maciejowski painted not ‘devilishly’ and ‘wildly,’ but simply nicely, in the style of Eastern European Post-Pop or Banalism.

  • Gerlind Zeilner (born in 1971 in Salzburg) paints in drawings and, according to the author, through this way of painting, creates an unusual relationship with the audience. Employing colourful and mostly wavy lines, often turning into stripes and planes, the artist departs from the traditional representation of objects and places.

  • (born in 1972 in Tarnów, Poland) belongs to the first generation of artists to have debuted after 1989. He creates paintings, drawings, films, and comic books. For a long time, he remained an (unusual) Polish ‘painter beyond competition,’ as he himself said, ‘driven to work by bad emotions.’ Sasnal attracted attention, provoking discussions from Warsaw through Basel or London to New York. A local-global painter – as the Dziennik magazine labelled him. In 2006, he was awarded the prestigious van Gogh Prize.

  • (born in 1971 in Warsaw) uses photography, drawing, printmaking, video, painting, sculpture, and embroidery. One of the central motifs of Buczkowska’s early works is the circulation processes inherent in biological structures, but also those the artist finds in space created or transformed by humans. The artist has developed analogies between architecture, urban planning, and living organisms in numerous similar works.

  • Paweł Kowalewski (born in 1958 in Warsaw) represented the Dadaist-conceptual trend within Gruppa. He created sculptures, drawings, installations, paintings, and objects. Over the years, his work has undergone several deep turns and is not stylistically uniform. In his works, the artist often juxtaposed words and poster-like images straight from the world of advertising. Long confessional titles of paintings play an essential role in his work. They are usually written on the canvas.

  • (born in 1979 in Salzburg) studied painting at, among others, the Academy of Vienna in the years 1999 – 2004. His paintings and drawings consist of numerous allusions and appropriations and are an expression of the post-internet condition. They feature anonymous stock images, clip art, cartoon figures, decorative patterns, quotations from the history of painting and similar elements, which are arranged in rebus-like configurations persistently demanding to be solved. In most of Frauenschuh’s works, painting itself and its intrinsic problems: abstraction and figuration, still life and nudes, originality and imitation, as well as authorship and reproduction remain the essential themes.

  • The works of another artist of the younger generation, Marzena Nowak (born in 1977 in Piaseczno), also derive from a broad reflection on the universal laws that govern reality. Also her art is dominated by hybrid forms and mixed media. Her works develop between sculpture, painting, fabric, object, drawing, and photography.

  • (born in 1974 in Wadowice) an artist from the transformation generation, long associated with Krakow. His artwork shows that (cold) geometry and poetry are not necessarily opposites (just like mimesis and abstraction, matter and transcendence). ‘The voice of no one, I think, is also that moment of liberation that can occur in abstract painting,’ the French poet-lyricist Paul Valery remarked some time ago, perhaps listening to music.

  • (born in 1964 in Hamburg) is interested in the materialisation of memory: he engages in cultural (re)constructions of history and questions the relationship between material traces, museum representations, and the forms of their use in the present. He also focuses on the migration of signs and body language (speech) as an expression of culture.

  • Michael Biber (1978) studied from 2003 at the painting department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He studied under the supervision of Professor Markus Oehlen and then Professor Sean Scully. He spent the years 2006-2009 in the chair of Professor Guenter Foerg, where he obtained his diploma. He is the co-creator of CU AT SADKA in Krakow. Currently lives and works in Kraków.

  • Zuzanna Janin (born in 1961 in Warsaw) is one of the most acclaimed artists of her generation. Sculptor, creator of installations, performative actions, objects, photographs, and video installations. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1987 and, in her practice, combines various sculptural techniques and media. Her works in which she uses her own record of reality in the form of compositions made of fragments of the material world sometimes have a stage-design-like quality.

works

events

Monika Drożyńska (b. 1979 in Nowy Sącz), in 2004, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. She is a post-media artist, embroiderer, and activist. Her media of choice are textiles, video and animation. She is widely known for her perverse, ironic, and critical texts, codes, words, slogans, signs, and symbols embroidered on a variety of textiles such as tablecloths, flags, and napkins. The field of her provocative artistic practice is not only galleries and other prestigious art institutions but also public space and social media. Her art reflects on interpellations and issues related to identity, language, the rule of law, migration, resistance and rejection.

For the exhibition Wonderful Line. A Sentimental Flight, Monika Drożyńska prepared a performance entitled Lifeline. In this performance, the artist assumed the role of a traditional fortune-teller and astrologer, sitting at a table in the gallery facing her successive interlocutors, embroidered the lines of their lives on previously prepared white rectangular pieces of fabric (of the bed linen type). The work of art thus created in situ was given to each of them as a gift. The artist produced an issue of 40 copies.

Related news

Partners

en_GBEnglish