Gypsum Flesh Story

A group exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts Gallery in Krakow, featuring works by leading Polish contemporary artists, is a look at flesh in art.

The depiction of the human body, its image and representations have undergone social and cultural transformations over the millennia. Flesh has been viewed from various perspectives; studied, revered, admired, an object of desire, subjected to oppression and disciplined in various ways. The context for the exhibition and its title is the collection of 'gypsum casts' exhibited in the corridors of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Specifically, casts of antique and Renaissance sculptures, imported throughout the 19th century, and whose last purchases for the Academy's collection were made as late as the beginning of the 20th century. The terms contained in the title—gypsum and flesh—build a broad bracket between the living and fleshy and the dead and solid.

The story spun around the terms of the title will be an attempt to look at contemporary phenomena in the field of visual arts, for which the body and its representations are not so much a subject, but rather a space for reflection on the specific obsession of our species to create ever new replicas, imprints and images of bodies. The exhibition will present works that take a variety of perspectives on corporeality, physicality and the human figure.

The works of the artists invited to Gypsum Flesh Story are set against selected casts of ancient sculptures (from the collection of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow). The casts, which for many years of the existence of art academies served as teaching aids in the study of drawing, preceding the opportunity to work with a live model (still reduced to the role of a prop) will be inscribed in another story. A story about a body that feels, fights for its subjectivity and, although subjected to numerous rigours, is able to shape reality.

artists: Marta Antoniak, Olaf Brzeski, Rafał Dominik, Bartek Górny, Ksenia Gryckiewicz, Krzysztof Grzybacz, Agata Jarosławiec, Julia Kowalska, Grzegorz Kumorek, Nadia Markiewicz, Gizela Mickiewicz, Tomasz Mróz, Dominika Olszowy, Zofia Pałucha, Andrzej Pawłowski, Dominik Ritszel, Paulina Stasik, Radek Szlęzak, Bartek Węgrzyn, Jan Eustachy Wolski, Kuba Woynarowski, Andrzej Wróblewski
and works from the collection of the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow: Władysław Maślakiewicz, Stanisław Popławski, Saturnin Świerzyński, Andrzej Wróblewski