Tag Archives: Joanna Mytkowska

PAWEŁ ALTHAMER: THE NEIGHBORS

Visitors can contribute to “Draftsmen’s Congress” through Sunday, then take a piece home with them April 23-27 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Visitors can contribute to “Draftsmen’s Congress” through Sunday, then take a piece home with them April 23-27 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Second & fourth floors: Wednesday – Sunday through April 20, $16
Thursday, April 17, 11:00 am – 9:00 pm: one-day exhibition of new sculptures, 231 Bowery, free
April 23-27, “Draftsmen’s Congress” disassembled and distributed to public for free
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

The work of Polish artist Paweł Althamer is very much about collaboration, cooperation, and community, fostering a positive sense of togetherness and sharing without getting treacly. As his first U.S. museum retrospective, “Paweł Althamer: The Neighbors,” winds down at the New Museum, Althamer still has a few surprises in store, as he says in the exhibition catalog, “to share the experience of what we are doing — to see people doing one thing together. . . . The idea is to switch the rules of the game a little so that everybody is included.” Since the show opened back in February, museum visitors and local organizations have been contributing in its evolution, painting on the walls and floors in the participatory, palimpsestual “Draftsmen’s Congress.” The painting will come to a stop on Easter Sunday, but that’s not the end of the piece; from April 23 to 27, the work will be disassembled, cut into pieces, and handed out to visitors free of charge, furthering Althamer’s democratization not only of the creation of art but of its ownership. On April 17, Althamer, whom Joanna Mytkowska’s catalog essay calls “The People’s Artist,” has collaborated with Dogon sculptor Youssouf Dara, the Bowery Mission, and other neighbors for a free one-day exhibition that will be held in the New Museum’s next-door space at 231 Bowery. (Dara’s work can also be seen in the museum’s window display.)

(Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley)

Paweł Althamer’s “Venetians” mix with visitors on the second floor (Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley)

In addition, the second floor of “The Neighbors” will remain on view through April 20, where museumgoers can walk among dozens of Althamer’s “Venetians,” gray, life-size steel-and-plastic skeletal sculptures of strangers he encountered in the Italian city and made face casts of, with a specific focus on those who often find themselves excluded or marginalized in one way or another. “It’s about being with them and identifying with them,” Althamer tells cocurator Massimiliano Gioni in the catalog. “People are generally scared of outsiders, but if we can confront and then lose our fear, it’s fantastic.” It’s no accident that the figures, which have gathered around eight video screens showing Althamer’s “So-Called Waves and Other Phenomena of the Mind,” in which he films himself in various altered mental states, have an alienlike quality. (The third floor, which closed April 13, featured many sculptural portraits, which he refers to as “totems,” of the artist himself and members of his family, as well as the miniature landscape “Mezalia” and an accompanying film.) Social collaboration is at the heart of Althamer’s practice, and that extends even to museum admission, as visitors can get in free if they bring a new or gently used men’s coat, which will be donated to the Bowery Mission.

ALINA SZAPOCZNIKOW: SCULPTURE UNDONE, 1955–1972

Alina Szapocznikow, “Petit Dessert I (Small Dessert I),” colored polyester resin and glass, 1970–71 (© The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanisławski/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Thomas Mueller, courtesy Broadway 1602, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Cologne)

Alina Szapocznikow, “Petit Dessert I (Small Dessert I),” colored polyester resin and glass, 1970–71(© The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanisławski/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Thomas Mueller, courtesy Broadway 1602, New York, and Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Cologne)

Museum of Modern Art, Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 28
Museum admission: $25 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

It would be a mistake to categorize the work of Alina Szapocznikow as a morbid depiction of suffering and death because the Polish sculptor spent time in three Nazi concentration camps and ultimately died of cancer at the age of forty-seven. Instead, “Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972,” continuing at MoMA through January 28, calls for a reexamination of this forward-thinking experimental artist. Comprising more than one hundred sculptures, drawings, and photographs, the exhibition reveals Szapocznikow to be well ahead of her time, belonging in the same canon as such influential artists as Hannah Arendt, Lynda Benglis, and Eva Hesse. “Spanning one of the most rich and complex periods of the twentieth century, Szapocznikow’s oeuvre responded to many of the ideological and artistic developments of her time,” write Elena Filipovic and Joanna Mytkowska in the introduction to the exhibition catalog. “Still, as a sculptor who emerged during the postwar period working in a classical figurative manner, Szapocznikow’s later conception of sculpture shifted considerably, leaving behind a legacy of provocative objects — at once sexualized, fragmented, vulnerable, humorous, and political — that sit uneasily between Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop art.”

Alina Szapocznikow, “Souvenirs,” polyester resin and photographs, 1967 (the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanisławski)

Alina Szapocznikow, “Souvenirs,” polyester resin and photographs, 1967 (the Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanisławski)

Primarily using polyester resin — along with polyurethane foam, photographs, nylon stockings, bronze, newspaper, wood, metal, and even cigarettes — Szapocznikow, who spent much of her professional life in Paris, cast works based on her own body as well as those of models and her adopted son, resulting in a compelling collection of breasts, hands, legs, torsos, heads, and mouths that stand on pedestals or hang on the wall. In “Petit Dessert I (Small Dessert I),” the lower half of a woman’s face, lips slightly apart, sits in a glass dish, a yellow blob oozing over the side. “Goldfinger,” a direct riff on the James Bond villain, is an upside-down figure, the head and lower body connected by a car part, all bathed in gold. “Femme illuminée (Illuminated Woman)” is a five-foot-high plaster woman with extremely long legs, her breasts cupped in red resin, her neck leading to a large, amorphous mass of other colored resin. “Lampe-bouche (Illuminated Lips)” is just that, a collection of lip lamps that actually light up. And “Dłoń. Projekt Pomnika Bohaterów Warszawy II (Hand. Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto)” is a deformed hand made of patinated plaster and iron filings, its fingers reaching out, trying desperately to grasp something. Szapocznikow’s works range from charming, funny, and playful to dark, scary, and mysterious, often in the same piece. “Sculpture Undone” is a compelling journey through the life and career of an intriguing artist deserving of more attention. The show is supplemented by short video documentaries on the artist by Krzystof TchóRzewski, Jean-Marie Drot, and Helena Wlodarczyk, and MoMA has posted on the exhibition website the three-hour symposium that was held on Szapocznikow back in October.