To mark the eighth anniversary of President Lech Kaczyński’s death in a plane crash, Polish artist Pawel Althamer brought a renegade tribute to the presidential palace in Warsaw.
Pawel Althamer
Posted inArt
Invisible Ceramics and Women Made of Bread Fill a European Art Park
Bródno Sculpture Park has come to be one of Europe’s most enticing and important sites of relational and social sculpture.
Posted inArt
Look Before You Sit: At Frieze New York, the Seats Are All Sculptures
Frieze New York opens its doors to the public today, but already during yesterday’s press and VIP preview the aisles were crowded, the common areas and restaurants filled with worn-out fairgoers, and it seemed as if the only empty seats were sculptures.
Posted inArt
When the Weather Gives You Snowmageddon, Make Art Snowmen
As we hunker down in anticipation of what will almost certainly be a less dramatic snowstorm than some are predicting, and begin to formulate plans for the construction of snowpersons that will immediately follow, we offer you this brief and necessarily incomplete survey of artists’ snowmen for inspiration.
Posted inArt
Pawel Althamer’s Family Secrets
BERLIN — Here in northern Europe the leaves are turning colors at an alarming rate. In the US, Labor Day came and went. But in Greece it’s still summer-summer — meaning there’s still time to visit the island of Hydra and see Polish artist Pawel Althamer’s rather anti-spectacular exhibition at the Deste Foundation Project Space Slaughterhouse.
Posted inNews
Manifesta 10 Organizers Defend Biennial in Face of Ongoing Boycott
The organizers of Manifesta continued to denounce calls for a relocation or boycott of the biennial at a press conference yesterday in London.
Posted inArt
‘Paweł Althamer: The Neighbors’ at the New Museum
A few blocks east of the New Museum’s skyward stack, a small gallery recently closed a provocative show focused on the final years of Joseph Beuys, the forefather of social sculpture. Though Beuys’ legacy in the social practice(s) of art is as manifold as it is contested, few have assumed his mantle as directly as the Polish sculptor Pawel Althamer.
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The Pursuit of Art, 2013
Memories fade. That’s the one good reason, as far as I can see, to compile an end-of-year list. It’s sometimes startling to retrace what attracted my attention over the course of a year; it is also instructive to determine where such a miscellany of shows fits in with ongoing areas of interest, and which ones, in hindsight, merited the time it took to review them.
Posted inArt
Single Point Perspective: Paweł Althamer’s Grass-Fed Surrealism
Inside the second floor galleries housing the contemporary collection of the Museum of Modern Art, a sculpture called “Bruno” (1998–2012) stands in quiet command of the room. Made primarily of grass and cow intestines, its materials transform the human body into a mediation on mortality via the digestive tract.
Posted inBooks
An Obsession with Art’s Communicative Power
The latest monograph of the Contemporary Art Series covers the provocative Polish artist and trickster Pawel Althamer (b. 1967), discussing in minute detail his “sculptures, installations, and pubic interventions.” Without a doubt, Phaidon’s Pawel Althamer is the most substantial art book I’ve laid my hands on in a long time, and it’s certainly not a book for someone with only a passing interest in contemporary Polish art.
