exhibition: July 4th – September 13th,
organizator:
partner:
place: Galeria Piekary
ul. Św. Marcin 80/82
CK Zamek, Dziedziniec Różany
61-809 Poznań
exhibition open Monday – Friday 10 AM – 6 PM
admission always free
media patronage:
Galeria Piekary is pleased to invite you to ANDY, an exhibition of works by Andrzej Lachowicz (1939 – 2015). Lachowicz was a painter, photographer, graphic artist, theoretician, and co-founder of the Permafo group, a person whose undertakings and commitment contributed greatly to the artistic world and had a significant impact on the development trends in art.
Born in Vilnius, he came in 1957 to Krakow to study at the AGH University of Science and Technology and subsequently moved to Wrocław, where he graduated in 1965 from the State Higher School of Fine Arts under the attentive eye of Professor Stanisław Dawski. It was in that city that he would live, work, and ultimate go down in history as one of the artists who forged Polish conceptualism and later post-conceptualism. He was known mainly as a photographer who pursued long-term projects. For example, the 1960s saw the launch of the series titled Shadows, which he continued until the end of his life. In fact, the essence of the shadow was his primary interest and a starting point on his artistic path. Lachowicz’s 1970s work began with Transplantations, a series of photographs showing repeatedly exposed hands. In a sense, that multi-layered illumination anticipated the multiple uses of the project, since in the late 1980s Transplantations gave rise to the Topologies series, which was a kind of self-quotation.
While all those projects were coming into being, Lachowicz also engaged in theoretical inquiry concerning, among other things, the essence of permanent art, which placed emphasis on the enduring elements. Lachowicz presumed that since art is an attempt to reproduce reality, it may seek faithful imitation without restraint, yet without ever fully achieving it. The attempts to render multiple iterations and layers of matter and light in his works were very much in line with that theory, just as the abstract painting project Energy of Slack and Energy of Fall may be said to dialogue with the authorial conception that art possesses energy and that practicing it one seeks to partake in the absolute. Far from being static, all those projects are more reminiscent of the futurist attempts to capture dynamics. Lachowicz was able to elevate art and translate artistic idiom into the language of philosophy—and vice versa. His creative path was a process in which he transitioned from traditional conceptualism to staged photography, though he would never allow himself to be pigeonholed as part of any current or trend. He was able to effectively combine photography with painting, decorating old photographs with abstract, colourful patterns.
The contribution of the author of Shadows to the Polish art of the 1970s and 1980s can hardly be overestimated. After all, in 1970, Lachowicz—together with his wife Natalia LL and Zbigniew Dłubak—co-founded the famous Permafo Group, which emerged from conceptualist background and came to be fuelled by the avant-garde movements of the time. The name derived from “permanent photography’”, one of the branches within the aforementioned permanent art. Motivated by the pursuit of artistic independence, the artists opened their own gallery whose premises served to display not only their own work but also showcase many Polish and foreign artists. In 2009, Lachowicz received the Krystyna Kobro Award and was awarded the Gloria Artis Silver Medal for Merit to Culture. The artist was the originator of the Drawing Triennial in Wrocław, and a fellow of e.g. the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York and Verein Kulturkontakte in Vienna. His works may be found at the National Museum in Wrocław, Museum of Art in Łódź and the Lower Silesian Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts, as well as in numerous private collections.
