GYPSUM FLESH STORY

ASP Gallery Cracow, Basztowa 18 st.

20.01 – 21.03.2023 r.

Artists: Marta Antoniak, Olaf Brzeski, Rafał Dominik, Bartek Górny, Ksenia Gryckiewicz, Krzysztof Grzybacz, Agata Jarosławiec, Julia Kowalska, Grzegorz Kumorek, Nadia Markiewicz, Gizela Mickiewicz, Tomasz Mróz, Dominika Olszowy, Zofia Pałucha, Andrzej Pawłowski, Dominik Ritszel, Paulina Stasik, Radek Szlęzak, Bartek Węgrzyn, Jan Eustachy Wolski, Kuba Woynarowski, Andrzej Wróblewski.

From the ASP Cracow Museum collection: Władysław Maślakiewicz, Stanisław Popławski, Saturnin Świerzyński, Andrzej Wróblewski.

curator: Filip Rybkowski

Photography: Filip Rybkowski

Documentation of the exhibition at KUBA PARIS

The image of human body, its depiction and representations have undergone social and cultural transformations over the millennia. Human body has been viewed from various perspectives; studied, revered, admired, objectified and desired, subjected to oppression and disciplined in various ways.

A context for the exhibition and its title is the collection of “casts” exhibited in the corridors of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Specifically, casts of antique and Renaissance sculptures, brought to the Academy throughout the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Terms contained in the title, GYPSUM and FLESH, build a broad connection between living and fleshy, dead and solid.

The STORY narrated between GYPSUM and FLESH is an attempt to look at contemporary phenomena in the field of visual arts for which the body and its representations are not so much a subject, but rather a space for reflection on this specific obsession of our species to create ever new replicas, imprints and images of itself. The exhibition presents works that take a variety of perspectives on corporeality, physicality and the human figure.

The works of artists invited to the GYPSUM FLESH STORY exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts Gallery are arranged against selected casts of ancient and Renaissance sculptures (from the collection of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow). The casts, which for many years served as teaching aids in the study of drawing at the Academy, preceding the opportunity to work with a live model (still reduced to the role of a prop), are inscribed in another story. A story about a body that feels, fights for its subjectivity and, although subjected to numerous rigors, is able to shape reality.

Filip Rybkowski