Categories
Subjects
Authors
Artists
Venues
Locations
Calendar
Filter
Done
September 29, 2016 – Review
Warsaw Gallery Weekend
Orit Gat
In a city where most galleries are located in apartments, the experience of visiting exhibitions goes against the art-tourist impulse to catch as catch can. Stand outside buildings, buzz in, climb stairs, see the neighbors in the hallway—it’s an experience of proximity that is different from viewing art at a fair or a biennial, or even a Chelsea gallery (where the inverse happens, and the glass buildings lining the streets post signs at the entrance to their lobbies reading “this is not an art gallery”), and it allows for an appreciation of the gallery show, that basic structure of presentation that viewers often neglect in the midst of other international festivals.
At times, the domesticity of the galleries inspires nontraditional presentations. At Asymetria there is an unilluminating group exhibition—black-and-white images of urban landscapes and portraits framed and hung horizontally, to echo a filmreel—about the influence of neorealist cinema on Polish photography in the 1950s and ’60s, featuring the works of Zdzisław Beksiński, Jerzy Lewczyński, and Marek Piasecki. But upstairs a project by a younger photographer, Błażej Pindor, is presented as though within a bedroom: there’s a single metal bed in the corner, a couple of clothes hangers on hooks. In the …