Paulina Ołowska

Paulina Ołowska (b. 1976 in Gdańsk) is one of the most highly regarded Polish artists on the international stage. She studied painting and video at The Art Institute of Chicago (diploma 1996), and then graphic art and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (diploma 2000); she was a scholar of, among others, the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She works in many media - painting, photography, collage, installation, performance, sculpture, neon and stage design - often in collaboration with other artists, including the Scottish painter Lucy McKenzie.

The field of her exploration is the utopias of modernism - the early Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, the European avant-garde of the early 20th century - to which she gives a contemporary relevance, combining research into the work of 20th-century artists with her own practice. Ołowska's work is permeated by a romantic vision of art as a carrier of positive utopias and by the conviction that „art can change the world”, as well as by a strong feminist thread: an interest in women's attitudes in art and a search for „foremothers”. Since 2004 she has reconstructed historic Warsaw neon signs of the 1960s and 1970s - it was with the restoration of the neon „The Volleyball Player” (1961) by Jan Mucharski in mind that she organised the exhibition „Image - Exchange - Neon” at the Foksal Gallery Foundation (2006).

Among her acclaimed realisations are the performance „Alphabet” (first in Berlin in 2005, later shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) and the Warsaw bar Nova Popularna (2003), run together with Lucy McKenzie. In 2016 the „New York Times” magazine placed her on the list of the most influential people in culture in the world; she is also a laureate of the Kunstpreis Aachen (2014). Represented by the Buchholz, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Simon Lee and Pace galleries, she took part in, among others, the 50th Venice Biennale; her extensive exhibition „The Spell of Warsaw” was shown by the Zachęta in Warsaw.