Exercises in timeliness
Attention à la Peinture!

  • Exercises in timeliness

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw would like to invite you to the second meeting of the “Exercises in Timeliness” cycle devoted to the troublesome issue of contemporariness and modernity and the question of extent to which these two terms describe time and attitudes.

Drawing on the full breath of Ołowska's work, but paying specific attention to her current and upcoming exhibitions, the conversation proposes an art which confronts historical forces 'by any means necessary'.

But which means has Ołowska actually chosen and stuck to? What do these works, these tactics reflect? What can they tell us about the historical forces shaping the city and the country, including its heart?

Paulina Ołowska

Born 1976 in Gdańsk, Paulina Ołowska is a painter, photographer, and performance
artist whose art explores the field of modernist utopias. Her research into the output
of 20th-century artists, combined with her own creative activities, allow her to
give fresh relevance to ideas unjustly regarded as failures or just plain old-fashioned.
A characteristic theme in Ołowska’s work is her interest in female figures in
art and the search for progenitors, hence her pieces devoted to Alina Szapocznikow
and Zofia Stryjeńska, for example.

Monika Szewczyk

Visual Arts Program Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. Previously, she was Head of Publications at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, where she (co)edited more than twenty publications ranging from monographs, through artists’ books to critical readers. Her curatorial career began at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in Vancouver and developed at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Throughout, she has been teaching at art academies including Emily Carr University in Vancouver, the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Bergen National Academy of the Arts and now the University of Chicago. Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in numerous catalogues and journals, including Afterall, Mousse, e-flux journal online and A Prior, which published her first essay on Paulina Ołowska in 2006.

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