Exporting Gdansk: Expanding the Medium, Evoking Plurality.

This exhibition highlights the most recent growth and new trends in painting and its expanded field, presenting a vibrant, innovative artistic environment of Gdansk and its surroundings, while examining key transformations in the practice taking place today, contextualised back to the 1960s and the 1970s with the pioneering works by Teresa Pągowska (1926-2007), painter and educator, working for fourteen years educating students at the PWSSP, currently Gdansk Academy of Arts, while challenging Formalist tendency in the medium of painting.

A point of departure for the exhibition stem from an attempt at political articulation of artistic practice as well as intervention in theory within spaces of the expanded field, attending to recent histories of post-Socialist Europe. The works on display offer a reflection on a range of challenges associated with a contemporary living in post-Sociality realms, acknowledging political climate of neo-liberal reality, civic aspirations of new Europe and its socio-economic challenges as well as perpetuation of power dynamics, established ways of doing things and traditional gender binaries manifested at home and at work. The works are displayed into four thematic sections: 1. Political gloss; 2. Breathing the everyday; 3. In the mirror; and 4. Permanent temporality.
The title of the exhibition Exporting Gdansk, points out the city’s remarkable history of being an international trading port with its transient cultures and complex geo-political realms, made of multiple European influences as well as past and present trends in artistic Diasporas.

Featuring artists:
Beata Ewa Białecka, Daniel Cybulski, Krzysztof Gliszczyński, Katarzyna Józefowicz, Andrzej Karmasz, Grzegorz Klaman, Dominik Lejman, Kamila Model, Hanna Nowicka, Agata Nowosielska, Anna Orbaczewska, Teresa Pągowska, Anna Reinert, Katarzyna Swinarska, Piotr Uklański, Ania Witkowska and Adam Witkowski, Iwona Zając,

Exhibition curator: Katarzyna Kosmala