DE. FI. CIEN. CY
Andrzej Wróblewski, René Daniëls, Luc Tuymans
28 November 2014–28 February 2015
Opening: 27 November, 7pm
Art Stations gallery
Stary Browar
Półwiejska 42
61-888 Poznań
Poland
Hours: Daily noon–7pm
Free admission
T +48 61 859 61 22
office [at] artstationsfoundation5050.com
www.artstationsfoundation5050.com
Curated by Ulrich Loock
Art Stations Foundation by Grażyna Kulczyk is proud to present the exhibition DE. FI. CIEN. CY bringing together approximately 30 works on paper by each of the participating artists, Andrzej Wróblewski, René Daniëls and Luc Tuymans. In addition, Tuymans contributes a large in situ wall drawing.
All three painters have been immensely influential and are counted among the most relevant artists of the 20th century.
DE. FI. CIEN. CY is based on the hypothesis that beyond differences of the socio-political context, the cultural affiliation and the generational position of the participating artists initially unrelated works may be seen as echoing each other and revealing unexpected points of contact. Such points of contact are informed by the contemporary crisis of the image.
In each of the three painters’ work the picture is manifested as deficient. In the case of Wróblewski, painting exposes the picture as a testimony to the impossibility of testimony. The work of Tuymans is constituted through addressing subjects that by their very nature refute the possibility of being depicted. In Daniëls’s painting after 1984, depiction is the depiction of a voided picture.
In each of the three cases the negation of the picture through a picture constitutes the painting, each time however the conditions are different. Wróblewski’ s work after 1955 is informed by a double trauma, the trauma of Nazi atrocities and the trauma of the apparently failed communist model. Tuymans reacts to a toxic family constellation and consequently engages in the revision of a poisoned past and instances of pernicious ideological systems, and Daniëls’s work engages with the 1980s “return to painting” by addressing the musealization and commodification of the art work.
DE. FI. CIEN. CY examines how in the work of Wróblewski, Daniëls and Tuymans the manifestation of the failure of the picture is turned into a decisive condition for the creation of paintings that overcome representation and generate a sense of pictorial agency.
Andrzej Wróblewski is widely considered the most important Polish artist of the post-war period. He was born in 1927 and started to make independent work in 1948 while still an art student. In 1950 Wróblewski accepted the exigencies of Socialist Realism, but after Stalin’s death, he abandoned the socialist-realist doctrine in 1955 and reconnected to his 1948/49 work. Wróblewski died in 1957.
Luc Tuymans was born in 1958 in Antwerp, where he grew up and still lives. His early pictures have referred to places of Nazi atrocities, but also exposed more generic scenes of unhomeliness and loss. In later series of works, Tuymans addressed different ideological systems such as colonialism, nationalism or religious belief, but also the empty places of the missing picture. On the 27th of November, Luc Tuymans will be awarded the honorary degree of the University of Arts in Poznań.
René Daniëls, born in 1950, is a Dutch artist who started his career in the 1980s in the broader context of the international “return to painting.” While his initial works were loosely painted and had a narrative and anecdotal inclination, he changed his approach in 1984 and developed in a more subdued painterly manner the shape of an abstracted exhibition room with proxy paintings on display.
Ulrich Loock, born in 1953 in Braunschweig, Germany, has curated the exhibition DE. FI. CIEN. CY. From 1985 to 2010 he has been consecutively the director of the Kunsthalle Bern, of the Kunstmuseum Luzern, both in Switzerland, and the deputy director of the Museu de Serralves in Porto, Portugal. Currently Loock lives as a freelance art critic and curator in Berlin and teaches at the University of the Arts in Bern.
The exhibition receives generous financial support by Mondriaan Fonds and Vlaams Ministerie van Cultuur, Jeugd, Sport en Media and The General Representation of the Government of Flanders at the Belgian Embassy.
In cooperation with: Galerie Isabella Czarnowska, Berlin
Research support: The Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation
