Paulina Olowska’s: The Mother

Paulina Olowska, The Mother: An Unsavory Monologue (2025)

 

By WM February 22, 2025

“We must reknit the strands back together…” Carlo Ginzburg, 1980

Across Pace Gallery’s global footprint, the Polish painter and performance artist Paulina Olowska is having a moment.  Her work is now included in three exhibitions at once, including a group show in hong Kong, a two person exhibition in Geneva and solo installation/performance in the flagship top floor venue at Pace’s venue in Chelsea. The views were spectacular, even if the performance was a bit abstract.

Similar to her Geneva presentation, Olowska turns the gallery into a kind of deconstructed stage set, where her environmental paintings become scenography.  At her Geneva exhibition, produced in collaboration with fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville, Olowska mines the imagery of Courbet, Manet and other art historical icons to affect an oblique commentary on fashion and media in the long 19th century.  Blackened by your own coal soot en route to Benjamin’s  arcade might be one way to put it. 

Paulina Olowska and Deborah Turbeville, Widows of the Wind (2024-2025)
 

In New York, the work is similarly engineered with a complex program of reference and citation.  Here, Olowska restaged Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s important 1924 play The Mother (Matka), a work she previously presented in somewhat more typical black box theater setting at the Tate Modern in 2015.  But Pace’s sprawling, window-lit top floor space clearly called for something more dramatic. The minimal proscenium set reflects back a body of paintings and drawings—or bodies woven through and across the them.  The visual centerpiece is the body of four massive paintings of the model Anja Rubik entangled in the same cobalt blue rope laden on the stage set—Hanna Wilke meets Lucian Freud with a touch of Carolee Schneeman.   Above them is a body of more modest size collage works, performance stills intercut with collage elements and handwritten notes which are also reproduced in a companion exhibition pamphlet. The accompanying text by historian and curator Joanna Zielińska links these palimpsests, and Olowska’s work more broadly, to Derrida’s notion of “hauntology” in which the specters of incompletely-vanquished pasts linger disruptively.

The performance however lives in a world of its own.  Across three weeks, three different actresses will play one-woman monologues as the Witch, the Artist and the Mother respectively. I was fortunate to witness Nora Kryst as The Witch—who turned in a haunting, King Lear esque diatribe in which she slowly knits her way into blindness and insanity.  The script name checks late 19th century Northern realists including Ibsen and Strindberg, but the vibe was much more Eastern (European) and absurd—a (haunted) prelude to the confrontational and associational work of Brecht, Artaud or Ionesco. 

The staging of the one woman play—set in the psychoprimitive forest of tangled thread and witcherty—amongst the skyline of Chelsea was a striking choice.  On the one hand, the interpretive roots of the play seem to extend deep into the submerged vortex of the peasant-pagan, a topic historicized in eloquent depth by the scholar Carlo Ginsburg over his long career (see in particular, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath  and The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults). The theoretical work of second wave feminists like Kristeva and Cixous—nearly contemporary with Ginsburg’s archival research—is equally germane.

Within the realm of all of these Mothers, the overarching theme is of course the return of the repressed— the matrilineal world of pre-Christian belief squirts and leaks out of the seams of contemporary culture in all kinds of surprising ways. It was no doubt a ripe metaphor for the coalescing of class consciousness that occupied Witkiewicz. and his peers like Brecht or John Heartfield. And yet, the million dollar views of the present staging and the ongoing swirl of political events just beyond the view of the luxury skyline entails a tug of war over the next chapter.  The status of marginalization in relationship to gender and class, and the moral right to claim anti-social chaos as a vector of ameliorative justice, is clearly undergoing contested changed.  And yet, the appeal to reflection and to history is almost never off base—the question will be what gets reflected in the looking glass, or the haunted fragment? WM