The Institution is funded from the budget of Toruń Municipality
Jarosław Kozłowski / SENSATION OF REALITY AND CONCEPTUAL PRACTICES 1965–1980
opening: 16th October, Friday, 19.00
curated by Rene Block
16.10.2015 – 3.01.2016
exhibition coorganized by MOCAK
17th October, 12.00: guided authorial tour of the exhibition and a performance from the Continuum cycle.
The CoCA in Toruń is staging a monographic exhibition of the major Polish conceptual artist Jarosław Kozłowski. Displayed are mostly the artist’s early works not exhibited before, revealing a peculiar “portrait of the artist as a young man”, sketched against a background of political and social events of that time. The exposition also embraces drawings, photographs and installations, the last reconstructed especially for this exposition, all related to the key problems in Kozłowski’s work and his artistic interpretation of language.
Since the 1970s, Jarosław Kozłowski has been regarded as one of the key figures in conceptualism, his specific intellectual inquisitiveness in analyzing logical structures of the language of art being his trademark. The artist, without denying his interest in paradoxes of logic and linguistic games, tended to argue against this sort of simplified classification, drawing attention to the presence of private codes related to personal feelings and experiences of reality in his works, including the most “analytic” ones. In a conversation with Jerzy Ludwiński, published in the catalogue Rzeczy i przestrzenie (Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 1994), he discussed the exchange of positions between pure ideas and what is established and well-known in the world around us: “It is because of this game of meanings that ideas and things acquire new senses. Otherwise, a chair would always be a chair and nothing but a chair, while sometimes it becomes the Eiffel Tower”. Among the examples of private codes he named his own artistic book titled Grammar/Gramatyka, 1973 (displayed at this exhibition), where different tense forms of the English verb „to be” were put to a test of the real calendar. The time of the book was equivalent to the actual time of the writing of the book, which in turn was related to existential events experienced by the author in that period. As a result, a work founded on formal grammatical rules could be interpreted as a kind of personal diary of the artist.
The exhibition in Toruń will also comprise sketches, drawings, paintings and assemblages from the second half of the 1960s, most of which have not been displayed before and have been rediscovered by the author himself. They uncover an unknown face of the artist, who back then was still a student of the Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Sztuk Plastycznych in Poznań. Created regardless of obligatory curricula, these pieces are records of very subjective sensations and experiences, also as regards the political context of those days.
One of the artist’s first installations entitled Sytuacja [Situation], created in 1968 in the Galeria pod Moną Lisą in Wrocław, will be reconstructed at the CoCA, as well as two other installation from the 1970s, not presented in Poland before – Terytorium I and Terytorium II. Among the displayed works there will also be sets of drawings and photographic works related to, on the one hand, deconstruction of used forms of articulation and, on the other, radical search of a new language of art, as well as works exploring various relations between common ideas and reality, between words and what is visible or merely imaginable. Again, some of these works that have not been on display before.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an event taking place in public space in Toruń – a continuation of the action carried out in Osieki, Koszalin and Poznan several dozen years ago, and later in Dresden, involving marking selected places as „Imagination Zones”.
The artist has dedicated the Torun exhibition to the memory of Jerzy Ludwiński, an eminent Polish theoretician of art, the artist’s long-standing friend.
Jarosław Kozłowski’s exhibition will also be hosted by MOCAK in Kraków from October 2016 to April 2017.
Jarosław Kozłowski – biographical note
Born in 1945 in Śrem. Between 1963 and 1969 he studied painting at the Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Sztuk Plastycznych in Poznan, where he has been working as an academic teacher since 1970. From 1981 to 1987 he was rector of the school. He also taught at the Statens Kunstakademi in Oslo (1992–1997), Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunste in Amsterdam (1996–2004), Academy Without Walls in Lusace (1999, 2001), Faculty of Arts and Pedagogy at the Adam Mickiewicz University (2005–2010) as well as – as visiting professor – at the Concordia University in Montreal (1988). He is currently professor at the University of Arts in Poznań.
He initiated (together with Andrzej Kostołowski) the international artistic network NET (1971). From 1972 to 1990, he run the Galeria Akumulatory 2 in Poznań, where he presented works by Polish and foreign avant-garde artists. He was also the programme curator of the galley and collection of the Centre of Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (1992–1993).
His oeuvre includes drawings, installations, paintings, artistic books and performative activities. He has held more than one hundred individual exhibitions in Poland and worldwide and participated in numerous international shows, including the X Biennale de Paris (1977), Peace Biennale, Hamburg (1985), The Readymade Boomerang, 8th Biennale of Sydney (1990), Europa, Europa. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa, Bonn (1994), Orient-ation, 4th International Istanbul Biennial (1995), How to Live Together?, 27 Bienal de Sao Paulo (2006). He received grants from The British Council (London, 1979) and DAAD (Berlin, 1984–1985).
