Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 4, 2022: Paweł Althamer, a contemporary Polish sculptor, performer, collaborative artist and creator of installations (#1587)

Saturday, June 4, 2022

Artist of the Day, June 4, 2022: Paweł Althamer, a contemporary Polish sculptor, performer, collaborative artist and creator of installations (#1587)

Paweł Althamer (1967) is a contemporary Polish sculptor, performer, collaborative artist and creator of installations, and video art. In the years 1988-1993, he studied sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Since the mid-1990s, he has been collaborating with the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. In 2000, he participated in Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2004, he won the Vincent Award from the Broere Charitable Foundation in the Netherlands. In 2007, he presented the exhibition One of many with the Nicola Trussardi Foundation.

Fascinated by the people who share the worlds he inhabits, Althamer has worked with and depicted family, friends, neighbors, visitors to his exhibitions, and strangers encountered on his travels. Althamer makes art that creatively reimagines reality in an attempt to subtly, though powerfully, shift conventional perceptions—social, political, psychological. For example, Common Task (2008–) is a series of documented actions and activities in which Althamer’s neighbors from a communist-era housing project in Warsaw, dressed in spectacular golden jumpsuits, visit various sites both familiar and foreign to them, as though they were space explorers on a discovery mission. In its humorous nod to science fiction, the artist’s project emphasizes the potential for the strange and surprising in everyday life. Decontextualization proves an enduring theme for Althamer, who calls into question not only his status as author-artist but also the ecology of the art world itself.

Almech, Althamer’s 2011 commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, is a key example. He transported a branch of his father’s plastic factory from suburban Poland to the interior of the Berlin museum, where he developed a sculpture workshop. Hundreds of facial casts of exhibition staff and museumgoers were made on-site and attached to metal frames, onto which plastic strips, created from his father’s machines, were added to form mummy-like bodies. The final product—a group portrait of the entire operation ranging in tenor from ghostly to whimsical—is a veritable army. Visitors experienced in real time a combination of the factory floor and art-gallery space, as well as their own transformation from invisible viewer to active participant. The resulting sculptures speak as a memorial to this collective endeavor and a stunning record of the power of community.

Althamer has had solo exhibitions at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany (2002); Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2004); Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2006); Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2007); Secession, Vienna (2009); and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2014). His work has been featured in several important group shows as well, including the Istanbul Biennial (2005); Berlin Biennial: Von Mäusen und Menschen/Of Mice and Men (2006); Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007); Gwangju Biennial, South Korea: Mainbo–10,000 Lives (2010); and Venice Biennale: Il Palazzo Enciclopedico/The Encyclopedic Palace (2013). In 2004 he won the Vincent Award, hosted by the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, Netherlands. He lives and works in Warsaw.
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