Marcel Duchamp exhibition at Galeria Studio, 9–23 February 1981
Kjartan Slettermark exhibition, opening 9 February 1981
Zbigniew Warpechowski performance, 9 February 1981
Krystyna Piotrowska exhibition, from the series “Aspects of Drawing,” 23 February–15 March 1981
On the occasion of her solo exhibition at Galeria Studio in 2022, Krystyna Piotrowska recalled how she came to organize the first Marcel Duchamp exhibition in Poland:
“It was 1980, a very important year for Poland. At the time, Iza Gustowska and I were running Galeria ON in Poznań. At some point my fiancé Grzegorz Gauden, who was head of the cultural committee of the Socialist Union of Polish Students, came to see me and asked if the gallery could do a Duchamp exhibition. Grzegorz was fresh from reading Urszula Czartoryska’s book ‘From Pop Art to Conceptual Art.’ He was absolutely delighted with Duchamp’s work and what that work meant for contemporary art, and he almost considered it our duty to have Duchamp’s work shown in Poland. It seemed completely unrealistic to us, but we undertook correspondence with the Pompidou Centre in Paris. With no result. Then we got in touch with the French Embassy, which referred us to Monsieur Blaise, the newly appointed cultural attaché, who very willingly took on the task of bringing Duchamp’s work to Poland. At that time, Poland was on the lips of the whole world, the strike in the Gdansk shipyards had ended—successfully and happily—so, it seems to me, that political circumstances meant that our request was treated kindly. The Pompidou Centre agreed to give us access to Duchamp’s work. After formalities by both parties, we travelled to Warsaw to welcome Boîte-en-valise to Poland. Mr. Stanisław Zadora, whose task was to look after Duchamp’s work on behalf of the Pompidou Centre, got off the plane from Paris. When the plane was unloaded, it turned out one box was missing from the three crates in which Boîte-en-valise had been loaded. Mr. Zadora was distraught, panicked, angry with us, angry that it was our fault, that Poland was one big mess. Fortunately, it turned out that it wasn’t our fault, much less Poland’s, because the men who had loaded the plane in Paris had decided for themselves that the cargo wasn’t suitable and taken one of the boxes out. The next day the third box arrived in Warsaw and we were able to transport the complete Boîte-en-valise to Poznań. The exhibition took place in November. Not in our gallery, because Galeria ON was small and housed in an attic, but in the Poznań BWA [a state run contemporary gallery], where Boîte-en-valise was guarded night and day by an armed guard. There were a lot of people at the vernissage. Włodek Nowaczyk, who undertook substantial work on the exhibition on behalf of the National Museum, spoke. This was followed by a speech by Monsieur Blaise, who spoke very profusely about the importance of culture and art and the strengthening of ties between our countries. Ursula Czartoryska came to the exhibition with her students. There was a seminar on Duchamp’s work and the exhibition went to Galeria Studio afterwards, where it opened the following February. After a few months, we learned from the newspapers that Monsieur Blaise, the cultural attaché at the French embassy, had been expelled from Poland because he had also engaged in espionage for France. We also know from history that a few months later martial law broke out in Poland and blocked the possibility of any international exhibitions” (statement by Krystyna Piotrowska in August 2022, from a documentary film forming part of her exhibition at Galeria Studio from 12 September–23 October 2022).
Marcel Duchamp’s exhibition La Boîte-en-valise opened at Galeria Studio on Monday 9 February 1981. The manager of the gallery at the time was Zdzisław Sosnowski. He was a participant in the student art movement and was familiar with the activities of Galeria ON. In February 1979, he organized an exhibition of the Poznań milieu entitled “Time” at Galeria Studio, which featured Krystyna Piotrowska alongside such artists as Izabella Gustowska, Jan Berdyszak, Wojciech Müller, Urszula Plewka-Schmidt and Jacek Papla. Duchamp’s exhibition in Poznań was a phenomenon nationally, and it’s no wonder that Sosnowski was keen for it to be seen in Warsaw as well. There are no photographs in Galeria Studio’s documentation showing what it might have looked like. According to Zdzisław Sosnowski, it was shown in the main hall of the gallery, a high theatre foyer adapted for art.
Slightly more details have survived about the presentations that took place in parallel. On the same day, 9 February 1981, the show “Video and Polaroid” by Swedish artist Kjartan Slettenmark opened at Galeria Studio (in a different room). Slettenmark was the author of a well-known action on the borderline between art and life. For it, he used a portrait photograph of US President Richard Nixon. This was not far removed from Mona Lisa’s moustache being painted on. In 1975, Slettenmark cut out the moustache and beard from his own passport photo and pasted them onto a photograph of Richard Nixon. He then pasted this prepared portrait into his passport and drove across the border with it. At the exhibition, as the Galeria Studio-published newspaper “Studio News” reported in its February 1981 issue, Slettenmark exhibited “6528 Polaroid photographs and video transmissions” (“Studio News,” February 1981).
On the opening day of the Duchamp and Slettenmark exhibitions, the performance Autochampion by Zbigniew Warpechowski took place at 7pm in the painting workshop of the Studio Theatre. Dressed in sportswear, Warpechowski lay down on a cross placed on the floor and lifted weights. He was then raised up. Autochampion belonged to a broad series of works made by the artist between 1978–94, in which the figure of the victorious athlete is intertwined with the figure of suffering as present in Christian iconography. It was a critique of the contemporary cult of celebrity, and at the same time a critique of the massification and trivialization of images of pain. The English title of the series, Champion of Golgotha, sounded provocative in a country where English language in the name of a commodity was usually associated with a substitute for luxury. The procedure of combining Warpechowski, Duchamp and Slettenmark seems baffling and original. Here is a Polish performer critical of mass consumption, and next to him a French artist inspired by the phenomenon of technical reproduction and mass distribution of images, and then an artist from Sweden, using the technique of collage to outwit the control of international authorities.
On the same day that the Duchamp exhibition was closing, an exhibition by Krystyna Piotrowska opened in one of the rooms of the Theatre (a buffet space often adapted for art). Piotrowska studied graphic design at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań and had her first solo exhibition in 1977 at Galeria ON. She was soon involved in creating the program of Galeria ON, and from 1980 she ran it together with Izabella Gustowska. It was she who initiated the Marcel Duchamp exhibition that was later moved to Warsaw.
In Galeria Studio, Piotrowska showed works from the 1970s dedicated to the analysis of portraiture. They were based on images of her face, which became the material and source of transformation, reproduced in prints, collages and drawings, broken into fragments and glued together again. It is difficult not to notice that Piotrowska’s exhibition also alluded to the inspiration Duchamp provided to conceptual art. This artist questioned the notion of originality and artistic personality, and undermined the value of the authorial gesture and the moment of inspiration. Piotrowska addressed issues of seriality and mimicry, similarity and difference. She approached this range of issues from a feminist point of view, asking about the presence of the female subject and the image of women.
Piotrowska’s exhibition belonged to the series “Aspects of Drawing” begun by Galeria Studio in 1981. As Zdzisław Sosnowski announced in “Studio News,” the exhibitions in this series were to show “Drawing as self-definition, drawing as disposition, drawing as ritual, drawing as exploration’ (February 1981). The first of the series was Leszek Brogowski’s exhibition, opened in January 1981, the second was Krystyna Piotrowska’s. Another opened in March 1981—this was a show of experimental works by Tomasz Leszczyński. In April there was an exhibition by Tomasz Kawiak, in May by Sol LeWitt, and in June by Tadeusz Andrzej Lewandowski. In the autumn of 1981, Sosnowski left Galeria Studio, and at the beginning of 1982 he emigrated to France.
Krystyna Piotrowska found herself in exile in Sweden in 1984. Four of her works on paper from the series Exercises in Portraiture (1979) entered into the Galeria Studio Collection. In 2022, a solo exhibition of Piotrowska’s works was held at Galeria Studio as part of its STUDIUM series, and the Collection works were presented among others by the artist dedicated to the relationship between image and identity.
Dorota Jarecka
