Paulina Olowska’s first New York solo exhibition, titled Nowa Scena at Metro Pictures in 2007, explored the propaganda battle between the United States and the Soviet Union that occurred during the latter half of the 20th century. Collaging together elements taken from Amerika and Soviet Life, the state-published propaganda magazines of the US and the USSR respectively, Olowska explores the conduits employed by governments to convey ideas to their citizens during the Cold War. Many of the photographs and lines of text Olowska borrows from these publications center around facets of art and culture that promoted capitalist or communist systems, asking viewers to consider the relationship between authority and the arts and how it has been moulded throughout history.
Olowska juxtaposes these political appropriations with visual elements of Poland’s punk-rock scene of the 1980s. In the present lot, Untitled, 2007, the logos of punk bands such as Pancerne Rowery and Los Piranas Del Baltico–both originating in the 1980s near Olowska’s hometown of Gdansk–and the comic book series Kapitan Kloss, are printed on a sheet of plastic that is collaged over an image of a dance routine. The layered nature of the work creates areas of varying opacity, obscuring fine details of the collage elements and rendering some patches indecipherable. The effort required to dissect works such as the present example reflects the complexities of navigating avenues of information in the modern age.
Born in Gdansk in 1976, Olowska often traveled to Chicago in her adolescence. She graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 1996 and graduated with an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Gdansk in 2000. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at Kunsthalle Basel, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. Her work is held in the collections of major institutions across the world including Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
