Anniversary of the Foksal Gallery
Slawomir Marzec
At present, the legendary Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, one of the most important places (not only) of Polish art, celebrates its 40th anniversary. Wieslaw Borowski, together with other artists and critics (like Tadeusz Kantor), was among the founders of the gallery and incessantly he stays its director to today. Such famous artists as Anselm Kiffer, Roman Opalka or Miroslaw Balka had their exhibitions here. Considering the historical context (Communistic regime, etc.) the gallery is a unique phenomenon in the whole Central and Eastern Europe. Despite the variety of oppressions and pressures, it managed to maintain not only the political independence, but also, what is especially important today, the independence of the logics of mass media and commerce.
Zbigniew Gostomski, one of the most important Polish conceptual artists, was also among the initiators of the gallery. And his present exhibition illumines the anniversary of the Foksal. A large photograph hanging in the corridor next to the entrance to the exhibition room is the prelude to the show. It represents the back of a man’s shaven head with a small cluster of hair the size of which corresponds to the empty, devoid of hair paintbrush. The caption: "Portrait of the Present-day Painter." This joke expresses the conviction of all the artists and critics related to the Foksal Gallery: the most important and probably the only currentness of art is its quality.
The exhibition emanates simplicity which results from the sophisticated correlation between classically painting sensitivity, symbolic imagery, mathematical analysis and intuition. And probably it is the grandness of Gostomski`s works–the equality of system and intuition, the search for their mutual supplementation and inspiration. The gallery space is filled with three paintings and a sculpture which together create the complementary situation of a dialogue. The pictures have very limited colouring and they are constituted by simple geometrical shapes formed with the use of contour lines. We may risk the statement that here the colour (shades of warm browns) only completes, or rather displays the almost black (caput mortem) contour on the painting surfaces. It is similar to Italian painting of the 16th Century, when painters used the brown undercoating to strengthen the depth of black. The largest of the presented paintings in the Foksal is a rectangle with a semi-frame strip round the edges. Its interior is built of misshapen rectangles which are getting lost in attempts to create one dominating space. It results in perspective impossibility–the space breaks down, unceasingly escapes into different dimensions. It forms a kind of accumulations of mathematical topologies, which George Kubler once defined as "the geometry of the relationship without magnitude or dimensions, having only surfaces and directions." The suggestions of the perspective get tangled and lost in the mutual endeavour to dominate. The painting on the opposite wall consists of architectural elements (and exceptionally white color), which perspective arrangement contradicts the shape of the canvas (trapezium). The third painting is a complex geometrical figure with broken logics of space–a typical impossible figure. Opposite the third painting, to complete the whole, there is a flat metal sculpture built of trapeziums with diagonal directions. However, they are too short to defy the prevailing verticality of the whole composition.
Thanks to the interventions, a kind of tension occurs between the impossibility of perceiving a painting as plane and the impossibility of catching, understanding the represented space. And probably this ambivalence, as a game of unfinalities, proclaims the item–the call to listen intently to the reality, instead of jamming it with our own interpretations. In large measure the exhibition has been inspired by Gostomski`s painting dedicated to Wladyslaw Strzeminski. At the beginning of the 20th Century he formulated the idea of unism: the conception of a painting as concrete surface void of any contrasts. To Strzeminski, like to Thomas Eliot, the artistic creation was first of all an attempt to cope with the whole tradition of art by transforming it into the matter of creativity. Zbigniew Gostomski seems to continue and develop this attitude.
