Poles Apart: new art from Poland

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Adam Adach

Currently living and working in Paris, Adam Adach's subdued palette and tentative brushstrokes lend a time-worn, temporally indistinct quality to his work.

This is accentuated by his frequent use of sources such as old photographs or newspaper clippings, although Adach always avoids specificity in such references.

Nevertheless, while showing certain allegiances to painters such as Luc Tuymans, Adach's work maintains its own powerful singularity; elegaic and steeped in enigmatic narrative, his re-working of images from the past allows him to explore "a different dimension... without losing its link to history".

 

Pawel Ksiazek

Pawel Ksiazek's practice to date consists of several bodies of work which, while visually dissimilar, echo and reflect mutual themes in a gradual concatenation of ideas.

His 2005/8 collection of paintings Africanised Honey Bees, for example, explores the notion of irrational fear and mass hysteria, while the paintings collectively titled Sylvia Plath hold inevitable associations with a very personal, individual dread.

Although recent projects have seen Ksiazek introduce mediums such as prints and projector slides, painting remains the principal focus of his work, and while constantly varying in execution and style, rarely falters in its evocation of darkly atmospheric states.

Monika Sosnowska

Monika Sosnowska works with existing architectural space and, increasingly, her own constructions in which architectonic references abound.

Hugely influenced by the utilitarian architecture of 1960s and 1970s Poland, Sosnowska pushes its practical ethos to extremes by, for example, creating multiple spaces within spaces, or parodying its sense of purpose with interventions that are useless except as art.

For Sosnowska, "space has seemingly appropriated us, it possesses and determines our psychological states of acting and being".

In keeping with this precept, her environments are designed to both confuse and accentuate perception. Apparently endless corridors, doors within doors or bewilderingly maze-like interiors engender a Kafka-esque, disturbing manipulation of space and its occupants.

More recently, however, Sosnowska has moved beyond sensory concerns alone and begun to imbue her work with greater specificity.

Warsaw's infamous Palace of Culture Ð a gargantuan 'gift' from the USSR that was as symbolic of control as it was of the arts - is evoked in massive works such as 1:1 (below, right).

A blackened, twisted steel frame, it echoes the presence of its real-life counterpart by overwhelming exhibition space with its own, looming identity.

 

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