Erna Rosenstein: Unexpected. Drawings, Things, Painting.
Galeria Studio, 5–25 March, 1984
Erazm Ciolek’s photographs from Erna Rosenstein’s solo exhibition at Galeria Studio reveal a markedly unexpected world. Stucco and other decorative elements have been covered up, chandeliers relegated to the background by a system of walls and corridors. Gone is the architectural decor that made Galeria Studio—until it was remodeled in 1987—a Titanic ballroom adapted for contemporary art. Black curtains have been hung to create a labyrinth of backstage areas, corridors and rooms where a viewer might feel at home and some familiarity. The floor is lined with something coarse but soft. There is undoubtedly a reference in the arrangement of this exhibition to what Tadeusz Kantor did with the space of the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw for Rosenstein’s solo exhibition in 1967. There, too, were nooks, crannies and passageways. The high ceiling was neutralized, the academic exhibition apparatus less visible. At Galeria Studio in 1984, it is similar. It’s a gesture by the artist. The space loses its civic dimension, and viewers lose the characteristics of an audience. They are colleagues, friends, visitors. They all sit on the floor. Rosenstein reads her poems to them. Among the listeners: Ewa Garztecka, Koji Kamoji, Kajetan Sosnowski, Artur Sandauer.
Erna Rosenstein (1913-2004) was, from her youth, associated with the environment of the Kraków avant-garde, adapting surrealist impulses, French modernism and the art of the Russian avant-garde for her own purposes. She combined leftist views with an understanding of art as a reflection on the artistic process. Part of this program was the framing of creativity as an activity for community and social communication, and the democratization of receiving and reading art. This is very evident in the organization of this exhibition, which, thanks to the small-scale architecture and the specific arrangement of works—vertically, horizontally, on cubes, the floor, with curtains and screens—activated the body and the vision of the audience in an unusual way. Provoking active engagement, evoking amazement, smiles, surprise, astonishment, objects from the artist’s studio are here incorporated into a peculiar spatial composition: a painted pillow squeezed into a corner, an open faux leather bag with an artificial jaw tucked inside, a recycled telephone connected by cable to a two-eyed object hanging on the wall, a book painted by the artist placed so low on the ground that one has to lie down next to it. The numerous objects which the artist presented in this exhibition she referred to as “rzeczy” [things] in the exhibition title, finding this a great term for phenomena that fall between painting, sculpture, ready-mades and assemblage. Things [rzeczy] are also recognizable as reality [rzeczywistość], factuality [rzeczowość] and suitability [dorzeczność]. And a “Rzeczoznawca” is an expert or appraiser, someone who is familiar with the materiality of certain things.
Erna Rosenstein’s exhibition was organized by Galeria Studio program curator Zbigniew Taranienka, who published an interview with Rosenstein conducted in September 1983 in the catalog. She said: “If I realize that I’m repeating, it means it’s wrong. I can only repeat unconsciously.” The last sentence became the title for an exhibition of Erna Rosenstein’s work at the Foksal Gallery Foundation and the Avant-Garde Institute in Warsaw, which I prepared with Barbara Piwowarska in 2011, and subsequently the title of a book on her work. Repetition is part of life; it is our automatism. But art must break out of this automatism. This was an important postulate of Rosenstein’s, which she formulated precisely on the occasion of her exhibition at Galeria Studio.
The 1984 exhibition at Galeria Studio was reviewed in “Radarze” by Joanna Paszkiewicz, in “Trybuna Ludu” by Ewa Garztecka and in “Przegląd Tygodniowy” by Monika Kuc. Due to a boycott of art institutions by art circles and the general public at the time (it was less than three years after the introduction of martial law), the show was not remembered as a significant gesture. At the same time, it was part of a climate of numerous such exhibitions in Poland in the 1980s, primarily created by alternative circles of artists of different generations, in which the classical form of visual communication was abandoned in favor of activism, community and participation.
Dorota Jarecka
