For season 2022 in The Twist, Kistefos will present the first major survey in Scandanavia of artist Paulina Olowska (b. 1976, Gdansk, Poland), whose practice includes painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. The exhibition will comprise both earlier and recent works, including key works from Christen Sveaas Art Collection and Christen Sveaas Art Foundation, transitioning from a more traditional display in the closed gallery through to a dynamic installation-based presentation in the Panorama gallery.

Paulina Olowska is acclaimed for her paintings, photographs, films and performances that often feature iconic women and engage with historical and cultural memories. This special conversation between the artist and Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick explores Olowska’s work alongside her selections from the Christen Sveaas Art Collection.

Paulina Olowska reveals the true nature of a gallery as a travel bureau, where works of art are portals into a myriad destinations imagined by artists.

Her installation of works from the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation is inspired by Orbis, the largest and longest running travel agency in Poland. Founded in 1920, its offices, staff and famously alluring posters offered prospective travellers a dream of escape. Olowska thinks of painting as ‘a beautiful metaphor for travel itself, a longing for a place.’

In their SCAD MOA exhibition Mainly for Women, artists Paulina Olowska, Karolina Jabłońska, and Natalia Załuska offer a dynamic range of female perspectives, creating an alchemical exchange of artistic approaches that reflects a complex and multifaceted vision of femininity. The collective presentation takes on an almost mythic, séance-like quality, with many of the featured works drawing from imagery related to pagan mythologies.

Join traditional astrologer Miloš Mušicki, occult scholar Micki Pellerano, interdisciplinary artist Delia Gonzalez, and SCAD Museum of Art curator DJ Hellerman for a conversation spanning astrology and aesthetics, on the occasion of the Paulina Olowska exhibition Mainly For Women. 

The Zënza Sëida Cultural Association and the Biennale Gherdëina are proud to announce the inauguration of the 7th edition of the Biennale Gherdëina on Saturday, August 8th, 2020 across the public space of Ortisei, Val Gardena, in the picturesque landscape of the Dolomites, the celebrated UNESCO Heritage Site.

During the opening weekend of Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann exhibition, there will be a live performance of Paulina Ołowska’s large-scale outdoor work, Slavic Goddesses (2017/2019), drawing inspiration from modernist utopias in America and Eastern Europe to prompt reflections on feminism and consumerism. 

For more information, please click here. 

Image:  Paulina Olowska, Zaria The Warrior Goddess of Beauty, 2014

Paulina will perform "Abeceda", inspired by the book entitled “ABECEDA” by Karel Teige - a key figure of the Czech avant-garde who created the experimental “moving alphabet” in 1926 in cooperation with Milca Mayerova.

For more information, please click here.

Image: Paulina Olowska's Performance, Alphabet, Galerie Meerrettich, Berlin, Germany

On the afternoon of Saturday, October 12, 2019, a conversation between Paulina Olowska, Clément Dirié, Natalia Sielewicz, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw where she recently organized the show Paint, Also Known as Blood: Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting, and French critic and cultural writer Elisabeth Lebovici will propose a polyphonic interpretation of the exhibition stemming from their own experiences and research.

12pm, Simon Lee Gallery, London
Please note this event is free to the public, but booking is required: events@simonleegallery.com

Paulina Olowska's work for the Liverpool Biennial is titled Grace, Charles and the Sunflower, a mosaic that references the socialist belief that through the creation of a public work one can influence and present optimistic visions of a better world. The idea is based on a Polish mosaic from the 1960s situated on the side of a public school in the village of Raba Zdroj, where the artist lives.

For more information, prlease click here. 

The exhibition presents the work of Polish artists, among them Paulina Ołowska, in the broader context of international women’s painting, which takes on the challenge of representing the intensity of the external and internal worlds. The invited artists propose an affirmative version of womanhood by endowing their bodies with agency, autonomy and power of self-determination. The eponymous paint becomes a visceral, sticky matter that leads us towards the point where all meanings collapse. It blurs the categories of power and objectification, thus provoking the question of when do we look, and when do we look away?

For more information, please click here.

Image: Paulina Ołowska, Her English Is Far From Perfect..., 2013

Puppets: Theater, Film, Politics, situates puppet theatre within the field of art history and within the broader context of the artistic, social, and political changes taking place in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s. The presentation of selected works, artists, and creative hubs, among them Paulina Olowska, has been woven around concepts such as anthropology of the body, pedagogy, or politics. The show’s authors broaden the reflection on the meanings and functions of puppets, asking about their political dimension. They exemplify diverse strategies of their use — from the exploitation of the propaganda repertoire to caricatural and derisive representations of ideological opponents – while highlighting their dangerous potential.

For more information, please click here.

Image: Paulina Olowska, The Doll House. After Michał Wasążnik, 2013

The Art Institute of Chicago proudly presents Iterations, a series of new performance commissions that underline the wide range of artistic practices and attitudes in performance today. Unfolding as an iterative exhibition over the course of three years, starting in 2019 and continuing in 2020 and 2021, and taking place in different durations and in various spaces across the museum, including exhibition and collection galleries, interstitial spaces, and theaters. New works from a broad variety of artists who explore how performance practice is situated in the context of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dates for 2019 have been announced, however the exact dates for 2020 and 2021 are to be confirmed. We can confirm that Paulina Olowska will be amongst those featured in the programme.

For more information, please click here. 

Installation View: Paulina Olowska, Pavilionesque, a performance at Silencio, Paris, 2015

Photography: Bene Karyotis

Paulina Olowska is the guest editor of the very first Art Issue of Vogue Polska, a section that you will find in the latest November issue. 

Showcasing works from the collection of Patrizia Re Rebaudengo, Herstory features works by some of the leading female artists of the last forty years and explores how they have radically altered the face of contemporary art. The exhibition includes work from Paulina Olowska.

For more information, please click here.  

Featuring the work of over 100 artists and designers from 21 countries, the NGV Triennial surveys the world of art and design across cultures, scales, geographies and perspectives. Representing Poland, Paulina Olowska will present a series of paintings that combine portraits of women from gardening magazines with elements from Slavic mythology and folklore, as well as techniques from Les Nabis, artists who left Paris in the 1980s in favour of the countryside.

For more information, please click here.  

Paulina Olowska invites a selection of artists to exhibit alongside her for a group exhibition that explores artistic relationships and statements. This exhibition is a conceptual continuation of her 2013 show, The Method, at Studio Voltaire, London, UK.

For more information, please click here.