Page 42 - Art Review

an ‘indigenous’ racial profile, but it has not always been so. Therefore,
I was touched by the exhibition I is another at Arton Foundation, which
pairs the androgynous self-portraits of openly gay artist Krzysztof
Niemczyk (1938–94) with the film Flesh To White To Black To Flesh (1968)
by the better-known (outside Poland, at least) American artist Bruce
Nauman. In both cases, the artists use makeup to reveal a deeper truth.
Kraków-based Niemczyk was variously called a genius (by no less than
Cricot 2 Theatre founder Tadeusz Kantor), Situationist, avant-gardist
and madman, but he evades categorisation. The range of his output, from
photographs of a heavily made-up Niemczyk through to his kitsch cubist
paintings testify to this difficulty, not least a drawing made when he was
fourteen years old of his courtesan alter-ego. She was to rise again in the
epic, posthumously published novel The Courtesan and the Chicks (1965–68),
a radical, ribald satire of Poland during the 1960s. Nauman’s film
is positioned ‘centre-stage’ in this exhibition. The seats facing the screen
are encircled by a black curtain. Another curtain hangs behind this
one, creating a narrow, concentric passage where Niemczyk’s portraits
are (almost furtively) displayed. It has the provocative effect of relegating
Niemczyk to the aisles, a space he has often inhabited. Would it not have
been interesting to reverse the expectation? Perhaps he is happier behind
the curtains, waiting to pounce.

above The author’s (invited) addition to Bernard Schröder’s
Revelation-Revolution
all photographs Courtesy the author

I conclude my trip to Warsaw across the Vistula river in the leafy
district of Saska Ke¸pa, populated between the wars by outward-looking
middle classes who built modernist villas and named streets after places
around the world, and historically home to embassies and consulates.
It retains this character. As coincidence has it, it is to Londyn ´ska (London)
street that I am headed to visit Pola Magnatyczne, a gallery whose identity
is delineated by poised yet challenging curating. The sculptural installa-
above Detail of Odile Bernard Schröder’s Revelation-Revolution tion Revelation-Revolution (2017) by Odile Bernard Schröder is staged
installation at Pola Magnatyczne as an aesthetic and thematic response to Wiktor Gutt and Waldemar
below A Krzysztof Niemczyk self-portrait in I is another, Raniszewski’s Destructive Culture (1977), an installation of the pair’s
at Arton Foundation controversial action- and photography-based work, which I reviewed
during last year’s Gallery Weekend (see ArtReview December 2016).
In these works, created amid the most recent French presidential
campaign, Bernard Schröder employs a range of photographic techniques,
drawing on esoteric traditions and chemical happenstance to evoke
the quasi-magical manipulations of a modern democracy. Still-lifes
of hallucinogenic mandrakes are installed alongside distorted images
of Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. Images of demonstrations
are rephotographed from screens, printed onto old-stock paper, then
laid upon suspended steel surfaces that conjure Macbooks, or razor blades.
The opaque luminescence of a wall-mounted steel panel changes colour
and appears to warp around me as I approach it. A similar panel is accom-
panied by a large nail, offered as a primitive tool for visitors to carve the
hackneyed political slogans of their respective countries across its surface.
In an inevitably ugly scrawl, I scratch ‘Brexit means Brexit’.
I remember Krakowiak’s equally vicious diamond, and think again of
the faint scars left by tremendous gestures while champagne was quaffed.

Phoebe Blatton is a writer based in Berlin

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