This catalouge is published on the occasion of the exhibition "Revenge on Realism - the fictitious moment in current Polish art".

With: Michal Budny, Igor Krenz, Zbigniew Libera, Bartek Materka, Mochalska & Blachut, Zbigniew Rogalski, Szymon Roginski

Realism is a term used to refer to a realistic mode of representation which seeks to depict things the way they are, without anything illusionistic. In the era of reality TV series this appears to be a hopelessly idealistic endeavour. Reality seems to be democratized under the sway of the media. Advertising, too, contributes to this, being omnipresent on the streets of Warsaw. Having emerged only at the beginning of the 1990’s, it was a new medium offering a new field of activity for creative individuals, including a number of artists. However, already in the 1960’s there had been artists who worked with reality – artists such as Andrzej Partum, Jan Swidzinski, Anastazy Wisniewski, Leszek Przyjemski or the artist pair KwieKulik who had used »positive negation« to comment on reality. Zbigniew Libera has dedicated a piece to these artists, asking art critics to write texts on them. For this project he used the layout of large Polish papers, having the texts set and published (»Masters« series). In this way he was able to subvert the media, giving the artists presented in the articles the public space he felt they deserved. This exhibition also presented works from the »Positives« series in which he reconstructed photographs with a negative connotation and lent them positive meaning. He questioned what appeared to be photography’s inherent objectivity by publishing these photographs in newspapers, reintroducing them to the flow of imagery.

Language: English