Inspired by softcore, forgotten muses, and country life, the Polish artist is staging ambitious exhibitions at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Pace

Skye Sherwin

Paulina Olowska unleashes wild fantasies in Turin and London

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7233/Paulina-Olowska" target="_blank">Paulina Olowska</a> likes to work at night: ‘It’s when the phantoms come out, the ghost women I love to surround myself with,’ she says. Since she first emerged as a defining voice in post-communist Poland in the early 2000s, the artist has resurrected hopeful specters from cultural history’s shadows whose latent powers might yet transform our present. This has evolved from rescuing the offbeat relics of her country’s disappearing communist landscape – street signs, fashions – to an ever-growing rollcall of underappreciated bygone women artists, thinkers and muses who meet in her exhibitions. These have included the glamourous British Pop artist Pauline Boty, fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville, and the wickedly witty and woman-centric erotic cartoons of Polish illustrator Maja Berezowska, whose libidinal energy has been channeled by Olowska into lushly decorative ceramics.
This collective spirit has been central to her art since she first returned to live in Poland in 2002, be it through summoning a polyphony of past voices or hands-on collaboration with living makers. After studying abroad at schools that included the Art Institute of Chicago and Amsterdam’s Rijksakademie, one of her first projects in Warsaw was to launch the pop-up bar Nova Popularna (2003) with Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie. Olowska’s output has grown ever-more expansive in the intervening years, from the paintings, costumes, ceramics, video art, puppets and performances she shows in galleries to establishing a house for artist projects in rural southern Poland and publishing Pavilionesque, a magazine of art and theater.

‘Visual Persuasion’, at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, is Olowska’s latest exhibition designed to bring her creative heroines together to ‘renegotiate history – male history – in a playful, dancing way.’ Featuring her own multi-media output, works by other artists and a film program, the show theatrically transforms the foundation’s cavernous spaces into a city at midnight to explore female desire. ‘Pornography is patriarchal, always from the man’s point of view,’ she says. ‘This will be a much more playful way to look at sex and what women fantasize about.’
Inspired by the nostalgic glamour of Turin, its – in the artist’s own words – ‘women in fur coats and promenades seen in darkness,’ Olowska has conceived her exhibition as ‘a city within the city – one that shows its secrets.’ In a darkened corridor, an installation of new neon works will announce ‘The Redhead Piano Bar’, ‘Le Select’, ‘Casa del Materasso’ and other destinations suggestive of ‘a nighttime sex life.’ They draw on real signage spotted on the artist’s travels and hark to back to one of her key projects: the neon volleyball player designed by Jan Mucharski and installed in Warsaw’s Plac Konstytucji in 1960, whose renovation as a public artwork she funded in 2006.

That girl throwing a ball in the air was a leftover from the program of ‘neonisation’ Warsaw had been subject to under communism, which saw luminous messages – anything from ‘wash your hands’ to an abstract line of light – installed around the city, intended not to further commerce but to seed an upbeat modern mood. Olowska has teased out a creativity particular to communist life from these neons’ invitation to free interpretation. 
The neon-lit passageway in ‘Visual Persuasion’ recalls back streets punctuated by late-night bars and strip clubs. Yet its doors open not to the objectified female figures of male fantasy, but to complex, thinking women. One presiding genius, honored in the painting Loveress (2022), is Emmanuelle, the titular heroine of the 1974 softcore hit about the erotic adventures of a diplomat’s young wife. It was the first ‘dirty picture’ to garner a sizeable female audience thanks to its screening in mainstream cinemas. ‘The film was mind-blowing for me when I was growing up,’ Olowska explains with enthusiastic laughter. ‘I saw this sexually open woman who travelled across the world, and everybody did what she wanted! She was a witch: she did magic.’ 
Olowska’s interpretation offers a subtle twist on the movie-poster image – in which the character sits queenly and topless in a rope of pearls – by turning up the introspection in her gaze and replacing the coy serpentine twist of her legs with a more emphatic stance. Echoing the way communist citizens adapted capitalist tropes to their own ends, the artist finds space for women’s desire within 1970s porn. A number of paintings reference photoshoots from Viva (1973–80), the erotic magazine for women whose liberated ambitions were frequently compromised by its male publisher, Penthouse mastermind Bob Guccione. ‘It was a man’s perspective on sex for women, but I loved that it had so much more storytelling than men’s porn,’ she says. ‘In my work, everything is a story.’

Her ‘city of women’ boasts a large number of works that she’s drawn from the foundation’s collection. Announcing Emmanuelle’s agency, Sylvie Fleury’s iconi neon Egoiste will glow above Olowska’s canvas. Others include a mannequin-filled vitrine by Thomas Hirschhorn and a hanging explosion of stuffed nylon breasts by Sarah Lucas. There’s also thematically attuned work by artists dear to Olowska, like Julie Verhoeven’s video trilogy Your Fly Is Open (2013), or Walerian Borowczyk’s raunchy horror La Bête (The Beast, 1975) in the film program.
It will be the artist’s largest show yet in Italy and she is taking over the whole institution, from the bar where the women in her paintings become ‘lonely drinkers,’ to the restaurant and storage space. New works include a video created with Irini Karayannopoulou, which reimagines as a female fantasy the wet-dream vision of a naked woman riding a frothing black stallion in one of Poland’s most famous paintings, Władysław Podkowiński’s Frenzy of Exultations (1893). Offering the last word in the show’s final room is Olowska’s 2011 painting based on a Norman Parkinson shot of a flame-haired model who eyeballs the viewer in front of one of Francis Bacon’s suggestively phallic paintings of male existential angst. The title says it all: Revenge of the Wise Woman.
‘Visual Persuasion’ gives a sense of Olowska’s roving interests and prolific output and it’s the first of two exhibitions the artist will open this month. The second, ‘Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas’, marks her debut with her new dealer, Pace, in London. It explores what the artist sees as her other major strand, ‘the individual, the commune and nature.’

In 2014, after establishing a body of work that seemed rooted in metropolitan life, Olowska bought Villa Kadenówka, a derelict 1930s wooden house in the mountain spa town of Rabka Zdrój. She is still restoring this extraordinary historic building, which looks like something from a children’s book, with its three stories of open wooden galleries and wide windows spread out between its stone foundation and peaked, gabled roof. And it’s become the sometime site for projects that connect with the land, from mushroom foraging and artist performances to workshops on subjects like dream interpretation, kabala and astrology. ‘My idea is that it will serve as a house for alternative knowledge,’ she says. 
The move has seen her pose the question, ‘Within globalization, can we resurrect feelings that go back to communal working and the appreciation of nature?’ The well-dressed women she plucks from fashion history to live anew in her paintings now roam in the forest as witches and huntresses. It’s also triggered her interest in age-old attempts to connect through culture with the natural world, from fairy tales to the pantheon of pre-Christian Slavic mythology. These deities have been brought to life in video, performance and tableaux vivant displays with robes and huge headdresses informed by the folkloric paintings and costume designs of another forgotten light of Polish art, Zofia Stryjeńska. Mamuna, heralded in the Pace exhibition, is an appealing supernatural non-conformist, a swamp demon notorious for her enormous breasts. In the five-channel video installation that gives the show its title, Olowska’s earthy creatures connect with nature by sheltering in trees, while further costumes and paintings take their cues from its woodsy back-to-nature vision, alongside chandeliers and puppets.
Olowska knew that, for a city girl, the countryside could prove a tough move. ‘Could my work have the same resonance?’ she wondered. ‘I said to myself: “What am I going to paint? Trees?” I am painting trees!’

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7233/Paulina-Olowska" target="_blank">Paulina Olowska</a> is represented by <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/3041/Ch%C3%A2teau-Shatto?lang=en"></a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1242/Pace-Gallery" target="_blank">Pace </a>(New York, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Seoul), and <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1114/Foksal-Gallery-Foundation" target="_blank">Foksal Gallery Foundation</a>&nbsp;(Warsaw). 
‘Visual Persuasion: Paulina Olowska’ Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin November 2, 2023 – February 25, 2024 ‘Paulina Olowska: Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas’ Pace, London November 21, 2023 – January 6, 2024
Skye Sherwin is an art writer based in Rochester, UK. She contributes regularly to The Guardian and numerous art publications.
Published on October 30, 2023.&nbsp;
Captions for full-bleed image: Paulina Olowska, Spider Painters, 2020 (detail). Courtesy of the artist and Pace.

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Inspired by softcore, forgotten muses, and country life, the Polish artist is staging ambitious exhibitions at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and Pace

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