Frieze Week

Polish artists' exhibitions during the annual Friez Art Fair

 

 

 

London's galleries and museums are getting ready for the influx of art enthusiasts with Frieze London and Frieze Masters running between 3 and 6 October 2019 at Regent's Park, and Frieze Week events organised to accompany this annual event.

Here are Polish artists' shows to see:

 

Tuesday 10 September – Sunday 20 October 2019

Maria Pinińska-Bereś: Living Pink

The Approach 1st Floor

47 Approach Road

E2 9LY

Nestled atop a pub in London's East End, The Approach is one of London's more unique gallery spaces. This autumn, the gallery is presenting an exhibition celebrating the performance works of Polish artist, Maria Pinińska-Bereś. The artist, who lived her life in Krakow, tapped into a 'reservoir of femininity-related issues' through sculptures and installations made from soft, lightweight materials in pink hues. With a pop-art sensibility, the forms are playful and have a compositional strength that extends to her lesser-known but equally important practice of performance. In her performances as in her sculptures and installations, Pinińska-Bereś confronted the 'burden of the "standard" of femininity' by focusing on the many facets of feminised labour, whether reproductive, emotional, or domestic.

In her performances, Pinińska-Bereś extends her commentary to politics and nature, in a similar fashion to Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta. In Prayer for Rain (1977), for example, the artist knelt down in a field in Prądnik, outside Krakow, dressed in a blue-green, ritual-like dress and sandals, proceeding to trim a circle in the grass, lining its parameter with pink flags to create an installation reminiscent of land-art. Removing her sandals, the artist proceeded to trample on the grass before lying down in a goddess pose, laying bare the 'natural influences on the female subject'.

On 29 September at 2:30pm, the artist's daughter Bettina will re-enact one of her performances as part of the Frieze East End afternoon.

 

Wednesday 11 September –Saturday 19 October 2019

Goshka Macuga

Kate Macgarry

27 Old Nichol St

E2 7HR

Warsaw-born Goshka Macuga is an accomplished storyteller. Her layered practice has been referred to as cultural archaeology, drawing on archives and historical elements to create new connections between places and times, peoples and stories. The artist's 2009 Bloomberg Commission for Whitechapel Gallery, for instance, looked at the presentation of Picasso's Guernica at the gallery in 1939. In front of the painting's replica, the artist installed a circular wooden table surrounded by leather chairs, resembling the UN hall, opening up a roundtable discussion around legacies of war and violence, with archives from around the 1939 exhibition of Guernica along with other documents encased in glass within the table, to resemble a museum showcase.

At Kate Macgarry, the artist's third solo exhibition at the gallery presents a new collection of collages that refer to the history of computer programming, beginning with mathematician Ada Lovelace in the first half of the 19th century. In these works, Macuga laces graphic paper through images, interrupting them and constructing new groups of visual references as achieved in computer programming. Many of the images are related to our current ecological crisis, offering visual constructions of a post-human future through their associations to computer programming and the organisation of information.

 

Wednesday 18 September - Thursday 31 October 2019

Joanna Rajkowska: The Failure of Mankind

l'étrangère

44A Charlotte Rd

Shoredtich

EC2A 3PD

 

Solo exhibition of Joanna Rajkowska’s new works. They follow on from ideas developed for her most recent sound sculpture, The Hatchling, a large-scale replica of a blackbird’s egg, currently exhibited at Frieze Sculpture.

The Hatchling emits the sounds of the labour of hatching birds: their heartbeat, the pecking of the shell and the first vocal attempts to signal their coming to the world.

The Hatchling inspired a wide range of reflections on the power of empathy and humans’ ability to feel and understand other species. It signals the fundamental importance of and our dependence on other species.

A slightly different thread can be found in the collages with the shape of an egg as a leitmotiv. Here the egg represents the distorted globe, referencing the earth. The egg-earth is used to reflect on how we humans, in the age of Anthropocene, irreversibly changed the landscape through its appropriation.

The series of photographs, Avant-garde for Insects, offers a different context for reflections on the environment and post-human nature. They show six rooms of an insect-house, where insects are exposed to the classics of the Avant-garde.

Source: OCULA

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