Viola Głowacka, Jan Eustachy Wolski at Piktogram

Artists: Viola Głowacka, Jan Eustachy Wolski

Exhibition title: Split

Venue: Piktogram, Warsaw, Poland

Date: May 8 – June 19, 2021

Photography: Błażej Pindor / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Piktogram, Warsaw

A “split” is a music album that includes tracks by two separate artists. Split albums differ from “various artists” compilation albums which generally include multiple tracks from multiple artists, instead of several tracks of each artist. Split albums were initially released on vinyl records, with each side featuring music from one of the artists only. Since the early 1980s, the format has been used widely by independent record labels, and artists from punk rock, hardcore, grindcore, black metal, noise and indie rock circles. Splits usually tend to find recognition among underground fans even if the featured artists belong to mainstream. Somehow the success of split albums is most often not of a mainstream-wide.

On the Viola Głowacka’s side we can find a vague amalgam of inspirations but suddenly we find ourselfes among rotten zombies, black cats, Dorian Gray as fan of aerobic and soap operas, or a knight looking for unknown ethernal pleasure. All painted in tempera or oil on canvas in a dim, dusky way. They look more like a gouache. Or, on the other hand, like separate panels that represent individual scenes taken from weird adult comic books.

The other side features a realm of Jan Eustachy Wolski. We are in woods and mountains, with a candle, or an axe, wearing jabot, with long nails and hair, on a graveyard. We are somewhere in between New Romantic and Black Metal. And definitely we are beyond time and history, in a distorted echoing loop of Frankenstein and Dracula, with the movies by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol in our minds. Colours are intense or corpse-pale, while texture of surfaces is thick almost like a plaster cast.

Viola Głowacka (b. 1985 in Biała Podlaska)

her recent shows, before maternity leave and pandemic lock-downs, include The End of Expressionism at Jan Kaps (Cologne, DE) and Paint, Also Known As Blood. Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting at Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw, PL)

Jan Eustachy Wolski (b. 1997 in Cracow)

he studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and currently is preparing his diploma at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. Recently his works were exhibited as part of Warsaw Under Construction 12: Something in Common at Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw, PL)