25 March 2014 – 25 May 2014 

Opening: 23 March2013, 6.00 p.m.

 

Curators: Dorota Jarecka, Barbara Piwowarska

 

Superimposition is the essence of Erna Rosenstein’s creative process and, at the same time, the title of her collage from 1965 which is now in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. The work is composed of a piece of sandpaper and elements which the artist had either drawn or painted: cut-outs from a surrealist drawing and a gouache, dripping with abstract forms. These few layers are very indicative of the manner in which Rosenstein worked. She smoothly moved from drawing to painting, and then from painting to the object, frequently combining different techniques, and superimposing successive layers, one on top of the other, exposing them to the effects of time, and branding them with poetic titles as well as her signature, built in the composition.

 

The form of Superimposition is of a retrospective. The exhibition presents Rosenstein’s most prominent works from museum and private collections nationwide: paintings, drawings, objects, assemblages. There are also historical films (Charlie Chaplin, Maya Deren, Mieczysław Waśkowski) and works by contemporary artists (Ursula Mayer, Anna Molska, Anna Zaradny). The film works incorporated in the exhibition correspond with the motifs which the show triggers: of surrealism, the notion of l’abject, the Holocaust, informalism or the object-fetish. The 2011 film by Anna Molska, on the other hand, is dedicated to Rosenstein’s less known and unavailable sketchbooks – the many notepads, notebooks or just books, which are all now part of the family’s archive. As was the case with other artists of the Polish avant-garde, from Franciszka and Stefan Themerson to Andrzej Pawłowski, Erna Rosenstein was also fascinated by the cinematic image, and even created her own visual film scripts. She said that “the screen for projecting the thought has been there for a long time – it is painting”. She considered painted objects as film frames, and compared painting to the process of film developing. Her drawings often look like the surrealist concept of the “automatic recording” put in practice, and her objects – made of artificial material – speak of entropy, the incidental nature of an individual life or the artistic gesture. The body in her art is the source of all life and joy but, at the same time, it is nothing but an object, a waste. At the same time, her works are full of humour and irony, though we very well know that Rosenstein often refers to the painful memory. She did not see the sense of art in the “artwork” but in the activity. For her, art was in a way the unmasking of the mental process, where the impulses, imaginings, desires, and acts are split in a parallel manner; they intersect and transform. It is a process of a constant “superimposition”. 

 

Superimposition is the third and most extensive part from the exhibition series about the artist prepared by Dorota Jarecka and Barbara Piwowarska over the past three years. The first presentation, organised in 2011, took place at the Foksal Gallery Foundation and the Avant-garde Institute – The Studio of Henryk Stażewski and Edward Krasiński (Erna Rosenstein. I Can Only Repeat Unconsciously). The second took place in 2013, on the artist’s hundredth birthday, at the Art Stations Gallery in Poznań (Erna Rosenstein. Organism).  

 

The exhibition at Królikarnia will coincide with the publication of a book by Dorota Jarecka and Barbara Piwowarska Erna Rosenstein. I Can Only Repeat Unconsciously, published by the Foksal Gallery Foundation.