Dominika Olszowy, Klaudia Figura, Julia Woronowicz, Czaro Malinkiewicz, Paweł Marcinek, Przemysław Piniak, Zuza Piekoszewska, Maryna Sakowska, Karolina Szwed

Curated by Przemek Sowiński (Łęctwo, Poznań, Poland) in collaboration with Magdalena Wiśniowska (GiG Munich)
GiG Munich is excited to be renewing its collaboration with the Polish gallery Łęctwo from Poznań, Poland and its director, Przemek Sowiński. The exhibition will be very kindly hosted by the new Munich gallery, The Tiger Room and its founder, Lu Zhang, at its premises in Heßstraße. Both Łęctwo and The Tiger Room are dedicated to providing a contemporary art platform for emerging artists and for this exhibition have invited Dominika Olszowy, Klaudia Figura, Julia Woronowicz, Czaro Malinkiewicz, Paweł Marcinek, Przemysław Piniak, Zuza Piekoszewska, Maryna Sakowska, Karolina Szwed, all young artists living and working in Poland to show their recent work.
Since 2020, Łęctwo has been supporting bold and authentic artistic attitudes, presenting young art and cooperating with independent curators. In 2024, during the Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Łęctwo was awarded the ING Polish Art Foundation Award for „taking an important and consistent position and for a fresh perspective that gives voice to the young generation of artists, who are able to speak openly about personal, everyday problems, for directness and courage in raising issues that may be difficult for other generations.” In the exhibition “Roztopy” Łęctwo presents nine different artistic positions that deal with the aftermath of a period of transition, to discover what was left after the transformations of 1990s Poland, blurring the lines between folklore, history and contemporary experience. It is a curious word “roztopy,” even in Polish, and refers to the early spring thaw. The winter snow melts away and in the mud and mire, reveals what is left behind. For Sowiński, this acts as a metaphor for the exhibition. As each change contains traces of previous energy, the key is opening up to issues and emotions that have long remained dormant. For him, the image of melting snow becomes a way of confronting fragmented, sometimes painful social changes and personal points of view.

For me, the word “Roztopy” evokes a time my childhood when it always seemed to be cold and grey, and smelt of wet – a time of Wajda’s black and white films and the cabaret show “Starsi Panowie,” which was always on in the late morning on my grandparent’s brown grainy tv. It is a time of silvery patterns on a orange painted living room and green apples from New Zealand sold at a new market stall on the corner as well as heavily trodden paths between concrete housing blocks, tall grass and stinging nettles on either side – all experiences I associate with the transition times of 1990s Poland. I remember going to church every morning for “roraty” and noticing how the children slowly stopped wearing homemade grey hats and starting to wear colourful, acrylic ones instead: at first there were just one or two neon greens, then purples and reds, then pink and blue. Once Christmas had arrived the modern, newly built church, the entire colour spectrum seemed to be complete. My introduction to this exhibition is personal because it feels like a personal one, these experiences of my generation now acquiring for the next’s a nostalgia-tinted sheen. Rather than looking them over critically as part of a process of historical assessment, the exhibition immerses itself in storytelling, this crucial time the beginning of a fable, a retelling of a no-longer-so-familiar tale. –

Dominika Olszowy, Yawn of the sleepy heart, 2024, courtesy of the artist and raster gallery