Paris Photo Preview

Czarna Gallery
Warsaw

During Paris Photo, the Czarna Gallery from Warsaw, Poland, will be showing work from several central and eastern European photographic artists. Here is a brief preview.

Szymon Roginski

Szymon Roginski's work focuses mainly on topographical documents, but he is not afraid to cross the border separating this photographic convention from the world of fiction and imagination. His photos of Poland in a time of transformation present the country in an obscure, disturbing, sometimes grotesque state.

– Adam Mazur

Teresa Gierzynska

The “Matter of Fact” is a series of work made using advertising photographs from western magazines, mostly portraits of actors and rock stars, which are then copied and re-arranged into new compositions. Copies of the images lose sharpness, change hue, become immaterial, volatile, almost transparent. Perfect bodies and beautiful artifacts represent aesthetics opposite to those of the then communist era. They are, in fact, a dream of a better world. The artist reveals here one of the specific features of popular culture, namely, that it concentrates on idealizations rather than upon realities.

– Text courtesy of Czarna Gallery

Dorota Buczkowska / Przemyslaw Dziennis

Dorota Buczkowska created a series of sculptures from fragments of her own clothing. She decided to expand the project and invited Przemyslaw Dziennis, the fashion photographer to collaborate. She directed him as he photographed naked male bodies, whose heads are replaced by these fabric sculptures.

For instance, there is a sculpture disguising the male model’s identity and is made of Dorota Buczkowska’s undergarments stuffed into an organic mass of silicone sacs. The combination of two different media created the opportunity to create a new context for both sculpture and photography. The project is still in progress.

– Text courtesy of Czarna Gallery

Monika Wiechowska

Wiechowska has accomplished many series of artworks. She recently showed a selection of pictures from a series entitled When the blue moon rises, an allusion to the 'once in a blue moon' idiom denoting extremely rare events usually preceded by a dramatic prologue.

– Magda Kardasz

This article is part of a series previewing galleries showing at Paris Photo 2010, where the spotlight this year is on Central Europe.