Zak Branicka Lindenstr. 35 10969 Berlin Allemagne
With the exhibition WITKACY-ROBAKOWSKI at the ZAK | BRANICKA gallery, two of the most important personalities in Polish art meet face-to-face for the first time. Both confidence(con) men, tricksters, swindlers and eternal practical jokers, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz - called "Witkacy" (1885-1939) - legendary artist, painter, writer and dramaturge, philosopher, photograph, and enfant terrible of the inter-war polish and international art scenes, is confronted by Jozef Robakowski (born 1939), an artist of the polish neo-avant-garde of the 60's and 70's, co-creator of Film Form Workshops, and the author of such well known videos as "View from my Window" and "My Video Masochism."
Mystification, parody, self-referential irony and plays with shifting identities are some of today's most popular artistic phenomena. Only few know that Witkacy was already working with these ideas at the beginning of Twentieth Century. In 1921, he composed his text "Manifesto (festo-mani)" in which he derided the contemporary trajectory of art and ascertained that the only honest artistic position is a lie. "The most beautiful art - and who knows if not the most challenging - is a lie (...)always conscious of itself, are the wilful deceptions, however small, much more so than the unconscious superior lies." Many years later (1988), video artist Józef Robakowski wrote in his own Manifesto, "Manipulate! (I Manipulate!)": "I am convinced that an artist is a sort of perfidious swindler, a social ulcer, whose vitality is an exact manipulation of his own account..."
An exhibition framing both of these exquisite swindlers has long been overdue. Witkacy and Robakowski's overtly humorous approaches to their work, rather abnormal and inconvenient during their own times, work today so much more poignantly and at the same time remain fresh and extremely expressive.
