September 13, 2024
Angelika Markul, HUNTING FOR LOVE
13.09-31.10.2024
curator: Katarzyna Krysiak
“Nécessité” is a concert by Stefan Węgłowski, featuring Pierre Emö and Wojciech Puś, which is an event accompanying the exhibition. More information about the concert coming soon! Angelika Markul’s exhibition is an interdisciplinary project combining visual arts, music and elements of theater.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
Angelika Markul’s exhibition is an interdisciplinary project combining visual arts, music and elements of theater.
HUNTING FOR LOVE is a story about the search for affection, “hunting” for love. As a continuation of the project “O, Lay on Me,” carried out last year at Leto Gallery in Warsaw, it will be the second of three planned exhibitions, in which the artist delves into the sphere of emotions and feelings, explores the various phases of love, and moves on the border of oneiric fantasy. The finale of the project will be the artist’s exhibition at the MAC VAL Val-de-Marne Contemporary Art Museum, in Vitry-sur-Seine, in 2026.
For the duration of the exhibition, the artist will turn the interior of Foksal Gallery into a theater, and put art recipients into the role of audience members. In the space of the stage delineated by simple architectural frames, there will be a composition of wax sculptures, seemingly abstract, referring to corporeality in a non-literal way. They will be presented against a background of the artist’s wax paintings inspired by landscapes from Japanese woodcuts.
Markul will animate the stage using typical theatrical means to give her sculptures their own dynamics, creating a choreographed scenography for “hunting for love,” such as changing lights suggesting the changing times of day: dawn, the setting moon and the rising sun. The audience will view this “spectacle” from a certain distance, participating in the hunt from a safe space while remaining, as it were, in hiding.
As in the case of the exhibition “O, Lay on Me,” here too the theatricality of the sculptural scene will be complemented by music composed especially for this occasion by Wojciech Puś, which will be played from a vinyl record during the exhibition.
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BIO
Angelika Markul, born in 1977, is a visual artist, who lives and works in Paris. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (ENSBA). The artist has developed an individual and distinctive visual language, which she successfully translates into a wide range of media. In her work, she combines sculptures, paintings, films and installations in a poetic and disturbing way, referring to the threatening and unpredictable forces of nature unleashed by human actions. Her artistic practice is always rooted in an interest in unknown and dangerous places. Combining fact with fiction, and even science fiction, her projects have taken her to some of the world’s most remote places (underwater monuments off the coast of Yonaguni, the melting glaciers of the Land of Fire, the desolate Atacama Desert, contaminated Chernobyl, and tsunami-ravaged Fukushima). Working mostly with natural materials (wax, leather, felt, light), Markul renders destructive forces that terrify and fascinate us at the same time, situating them outside cultural categories of good and evil. Markul is the recipient of numerous awards: Prix MAIF (2017), Prix COAL (2016), and SAM Art Project Prize (2013). Her first exhibition in Poland was Foksal Gallery (“Dream of the Fly,” 2006). While her work is mainly exhibited abroad, she regularly returns to Poland.
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