Whoever would like to lean out of the friendly gloom

The exhibition inaugurating the ERZAC project presents the oeuvre of two artist couples connected to Wrocław, Wanda Gołkowska and Jan Chwałczyk, as well as Irmina Rusicka and Kasper Lecnim. The works on display - created over a period of more than six decades - touch on the themes of the transformation of Polish society and the forming of its identity, refer with doubt to the idea of modernism, and ask about the role of the private and the intimate in art.

Whoever would like to lean out of the friendly gloom talks about the processes of co-creation and reconstruction by presenting works that draw on the artists' immediate environment. In Rusicka's and Lecnim's work, the post-war history of Polish art and society provides an important point of reference for their joint works that introduce a domestic archaeology of socialism - the sculptures were created from the post-renovation rubble of their house built in 1968. In the same year, Gołkowska and Chwałczyk created artistic proposals that heralded conceptualism in Poland. Their works, created during the Martial Law, mark a turn towards local contexts and the closest references after the Gierek decade of opening up to the West and creating international art networks.

In the artistic practice of both pairs, the mechanisms of the establishment of small and large communities and the exclusion of those who remain on their margins are revealed in different ways. Questioning the modernist canon based on the belief in rational development and unlimited progress, the artists presented in the exhibition also look closely at the role the natural world plays in it and reject the artificial dichotomy of nature and culture. The titular friendly obscure carries multiple meanings in which a semi-peripheral condition, intimacy, a position of distance from radiation from the centre and unclear proximity are intertwined.

ERZAC is a research and exhibition project focused on contemporary and neo-avant-garde art of Central and Eastern Europe. The long 1970s are an important point of reference and source of knowledge about the present, as well as an inspiration for a new perception of our region, its heritage and identity. ERZAC's name encapsulates the project's core ideas: improvisation, ‘easternness’, sociable self-sufficiency, post-communism, familiarity, the local, and derision of the cult of the Western original.

Curator: Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz