On the 20 February at 6.00pm the Cracow Foto-Medium-Art Gallery will host the opening of an exhibition of Zdzisław Sosnowski’s work. The artist will attend the event, which will be held under the title My Time, presenting his work for the period from the 1970s until the present day.  Amongst the exhibits you will have the opportunity to see Sosnowski’s films, photographs and experimental audio pieces.

Sosnowski’s work, dating back to the first half of 1970s, is an investigation of the media (film and photography) which reveal his interest in the semiotics of image and the characteristic tendency to de-authorize art, to leave the notion of uniqueness and the existential load of art.  Sosnowski’s pieces, centered on the documentation of everyday, banal experiences - registered in series of photographs - may be of special interest here. These are Potatoes (1971), Glasses (1971), Smiles (1972), Little-big Change (1971) and also films, such as Simple Operations (1971/72) and Eating (1973). His film Scalening of Fish (1970), realized in a similar idiom, exudes the aesthetics of anxiety-provoking and yet desirable repulsion.

The title of the whole exhibition, My Time, corresponds with Sosnowski’s strategy of myth-creation and autocreation. Its finest example is the cycle of photographs he’s taken since 1974 and the film The Goalkeeper, in which he manipulates images drawn from the sphere of  pop iconography  to embody a sports idol, worshipped and admired by women. Sosnowski has consciously used the language of the mass media. Leaving behind the analytic investigation, he’s concentrated his efforts on the cultural and social problems.  Due to the pragmatic choice of its creative language The Goalkeeper remains one of the most important postconceptual art documents.

Current work – the large format My Time (2000) and The Fly Collectors (2007), made with the use of computer techniques, are a ludic development of the problem areas relating to autocreation, autoreflection and tautology.

Zdzisław Sosnowski (b. 1947) graduated from the Wrocław Academy of Arts (PWSSP Wrocław).  He is involved in experimental cinema and photography, performance and audio art. Sosnowski combines his creative work with being an active animator of artistic circles and an art theorist. In the 1970s, he was one of the most dynamic figures of the neo-avantgarde movement, the interests of which borders on conceptual and post-conceptual art. He was one of the first artists to utilize the language of pop culture and create his self-image. In Wrocław he was one of the members of the Actual Art Gallery and also cooperated with Permafo. Once he moved to Warsaw, he managed the Galeria Współczesna (Contemporary Gallery) together with Jacek Drabik and Janusz Haka. He co-organised the famous The Aspects of Contemporary Polish Art (1975) exhibition. In the following years, he headed the Studio Gallery, where he presented the work of Sol Le Witt and Mario Merz, among others. Sosnowski’s work has been shown at numerous individual and collective shows, amongst others in Galeria Akumulatory 2 (Poznań, 1973), The Dziekanka Gallery (Warsaw, 1973), X Biennale De Paris (1977), Presences Polonaises (Pompidou Centre, 1983), Wanda Dunikowski Galerie (Cologne, 1989).  Many art critics have written about Sosnowski’s work and artistic approach, amongst them Marcin Giżycki, Bożena Stokłosa, Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski and, more recently, Łukasz Ronduda. Since 1982 Zdzisław Sosnowski has lived and worked in Paris.

Exhibition curator: Krzysztof Siatka

The exhibition will be open to public until 26 April 2008.
Please visit our website at
http://foto-medium-art.com/press/zdzislaw-sosnowski-my-time/download/