Barbara Kozłowska: You Can See All Of This Anywhere
The exhibition You Can See All Of This Anywhere at the Arton Foundation marks a return to the work of Barbara Kozłowska, one of the most significant artists of the Wrocław avant-garde art circles of the 1970s. Kozłowska participated in the breakthrough events of Polish art of the 1970s, such as the Symposium “Wrocław 70” and “The Dreamers Congress” in Elbląg in 1971. Between 1972 and 1982, the artist transformed her studio in Wrocław into her artist-run gallery space Babel – an independent and autonomous venue for artists to meet. Still, as her husband Zbigniew Makarewicz remarks, Kozłowska was a well-known and an unknown figure at the same time. This situation might result from the fact that her art often relied on ephemeral, hardly perceptible and disinterested gestures. Her activities adopted the form of performances, happenings, ephemeral interventions in space. Since 1970, Kozłowska pursued the project “Borderline”, within which the artist travelled to the USSR (Siberia), Great Britain, Malta, Italy, France, The Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Germany and the USA.
Presented at the exhibition at the Arton Foundation, the installation Negatives of Fiction from 1976 can be regarded as a synthesis of Kozłowskas artistic practice. The artist – an erudite explorer of various fields of knowledge – was always on the lookout for phenomena so obvious in the physical world that they went unnoticed. The artist then represented the observed astronomical and natural phenomena in the form of quasi-abstract works.
Despite the ephemeral nature of pursued activities, Kozłowska left a legacy that comprises numerous works, poetry and theoretical texts, which form her vast and still unexplored archive. The archive is particularly important as the artist was reluctant to explain her own work during her lifetime. The exhibition inaugurates the efforts of the Arton Foundation devoted to the exploration of Barbara Kozłowskas archive. It is also yet another of our shows that spotlights Polish women. artists of the 1970s.
