Tuesday,
16 April
The stone floor of the City Art Gallery of Kalisz is both the inspiration and the
subject itself of Pola Dwurnik’s exhibition – “The Morphology of the Floor”. The artist has gone through the floor with a fine-tooth comb, deeply analysing it and using it as reference point, material and subject of her reserch. She creates a fictional genealogy by putting it in different orders: cosmological, mythical, literary, historical, scientific and, last but not least, artistic. Using various fragments of the floor’s pattern she creates a fictional conspiracy theory, makes abstract paintings and a videoclip, measures, counts, speculates – as a mad scientist, every time she writes a new history of the floor. The interior of the gallery and its floor becomes an area for perception exercises, increasing associations and arousing the senses.
The artist juxtaposes forgery, manipulation and parascientific play with the effects of her real research and artefacts that were made in her studio. Every effort of Pola Dwurnik is an experiment and its aim is to reevaluate our percepion of something as trivial as an ordinary stone floor. Pola Dwurnik asks a question about the power of art. Does projecting on the floor change its perception? Could we just for a moment believe that a drawing of the floor which we used to consider as an ugly relict of the past era is in fact a record of the Big Bang? A mythical temple ornament? A cime trial or a landscape in a hip-hop video? Are we ready to accept an invitation to a collective fantasy game? And, when the exhibition ends, will we enter onto the floor again as normal?
The project has a conceptual and speculative character. The arrangement of the exhibition will consist of various elements such as paintings, gouache, water-colours, drawings, photos, graphics, objects, books, documents, videos and installational elements made directly on the floor.
POLA (APOLONIA) DWURNIK – is a visual artist who was born in 1979 in Warsaw. She has been working mainly with oil painting, various drawing media, collage and Mail Art. She has been also active as a self-publishing artist and editor. She studied painting and drawing in the studios of her parents – Edward Dwurnik, a painter and Teresa Gierzyńska, a photographer. In the years 1998-2003 Pola Dwurnik studied Art History at Warsaw University. Between 2004 and 2005 she was an Artist-in-Residence at Stiftung Laurenz-Haus in Basel. In 2008 she was nominated for the Henkel Art Award 2008, for Contemporary Drawing (international final) in Vienna. In 2010 she was an Artist-in-Residence at The Knot, a mobile platform for art in Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest.
She has published three art books with drawings: „Świetlica” (2003, Galeria Raster), „Living in Basel” (2007, Christoph Merian Verlag), „Kronika Towarzyska” (2008, Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle). In 2013 Dwurnik published „Girl on Canvas” an artbook about painting and its reception. In the book over thirty different contributors have written about their intellectual and emotional responses to Pola Dwurnik’s paintings. In 2014 „Girl on Canvas” received a Distinction in the competition The Most Beautiful Books 2013 at the Polish Book Publishers Association in Warsaw.
Since 2012 Pola Dwurnik has been a member of the BERLINERPOOL Arts Network and Mobile Archive in Berlin.
Pola’s works are in several collections; the Museum of Contemporary Art MOCAK in Kraków, the Contemporary Museum Wrocław in Wrocław and in private collections in Poland, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Spain, France, Slovakia, Czech Republic, USA, Mexico, Japan and Australia.
Since the begining of 2015 the artist has been co-operating with the Galerie Idea-Fixa in Basel.
Pola Dwurnik lives in Berlin and Warsaw.
Official webpages:
www.poladwurnik.com
https://www.facebook.com/apoloniadwurnik