Paulina Olowska

Kurimanzutto presents Resonance, the first exhibition in Mexico by artist Paulina Olowska. Resonance gathers a series of works made in situ and others prepared during the artist’s previous travels to Mexico.

Paulina Olowska often works with references from the past that appear in her pieces as ghosts and apparitions, vibrations of another era that interfere with her pictorial creations. In Resonance, Olowska makes direct reference to the archive of artist and fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville from the MUUS Collection. Turbeville’s photographic sessions in Poland and in Mexico in the 80’s and 90’s inspired Olowska to recreate some of the scenes and respond to many of the mysterious and fleeting images in her work.

What I share with Deborah is a certain melancholia for fashion. That fashion has a symbolic dimension also connected to womanhood. But what she did with fashion is like what she did with photography, she distressed it, distanced it, she used it in metaphoric senses to bring it back to historical figures and places.

–Paulina Olowska

In search of traces from Turbeville’s visit to Mexico in 1989, Olowska travelled to Mexico in 2022 and collaborated with painter and muse Carmen Serratos and photographer Karla Ximena Cerón. Together they reactivated and performed tableaux vivants in different sites in connection to Tuberville’s residence in San Miguel de Allende, where she had bought an 18th century house (currently a boutique hotel called Casa No Name), and the mining ghost town of Mineral de Pozos to recreate and reimagine scenes from the fashion photographer’s imaginary among the ruins, the opuntia cacti and the abandoned cemetery.

Later on in Kraków, Olowska photographed the Potocki Palace where Turbeville worked on a fashion shoot for W magazine in 1998 as well as the Tadeusz Kantor Theater and the Michalik Cave, a 19th Century Cabaret. During this pilgrimage to the sites of the artist’s past Olowska recreated Turbeville’s images with photographer Jacqueline Sobiszewski. With images collaged out of these new visual references and materials, Olowska recomposes additional scenes directly on the gallery wall in collaboration with Wanda, a WallPen.

For Resonance, Olowska expands her practice beyond painting, working with the stone mason workshop of Joel Arrieta in Mexico to carve images from Turbeville’s photographs into several limestone sculptures. These new works on view are exhibited alongside a selection of original prints from the MUUS Collection of Turbeville’s trips to Mexico and Krakow. The photographs are available for acquisition from the MUUS Collection’s representatives.

— Kurimanzutto

Photo: Jacqueline Sobiszewski