Picture this. Stories told during the summer silly season and illustrations for a fictional newspaper describing dogs’ extraordinary encounters with aliens. A plague of dogs arguing in the Japanese Garden and a hint of surrealism hanging over a city on a sweltering summer’s day.
“Holiday Courier” by Michał Prażmo is a series of works inspired by summer, with the Polish coal capital Silesia as a backdrop. It’s part of an exhibition entitled “The Last Days of Vacation”. The idea of showing Silesia as a holiday resort was conceived by the show’s curator, Adrian Chorębała, who wanted someone from outside the region to highlight what usually goes unnoticed. So, what does Silesia look like in Prażmo’s paintings, and how do artists from the region see it? Do these perspectives differ significantly? And what is young Silesian art like today?
Postcards from the holidays
“Holiday Courier” and “The Last Days of Vacation” were meant to be – as Michał Prażmo puts it – a break after his previous series of paintings, “The Breakdown Treats”, a reflection on mental crises, loneliness and attempts to escape reality.
“Painting that sort of thing is exhausting too and it affects me, so I wanted to do something by way of contrast, something more relaxed, more nostalgic,” he says.
“I wanted to give myself a bit of a breather, but I also had a large collection of photos from my own travels, showing beautiful places that lent themselves to painting and could be a source of inspiration. I often work by putting together mood boards, using my own photos, cutting and combining them. I already had a folder, my own collection of favourite photographs, so I decided to use it to create this series.”
Mood is the key word for the exhibition at Rondo Sztuki. The perspective of someone from another part of Poland was meant to bring lightness to the stereotypical image of Silesia. As the artist admits, his idea of the region, shaped back when he lived in northern Poland, was based mainly on stories he had heard. Travelling around Silesia, however, turned out to be full of surprises. What intrigued him most was the architecture and the natural surroundings.
“I wanted to avoid those clichéd associations. I started with Spodek, because it is a symbol and has to appear somewhere, but after that I didn’t want to tick off any more icons. What caught my eye most was Silesian Park, with its striking architecture and vast open space. After all, it’s the largest urban park in Europe.”
Prażmo wanted the Poland he depicts to be nostalgic, and the paintings – as he puts it – postcard-like and idyllic, showing Poland to be a little nostalgic and rooted in memory, but with a story that comes with a twist.
A dog’s life
Dogs are the main characters in Michał Prażmo’s paintings. Canines and other animals feature in the work of many others including Doma Suszczyńska, who combines inspirations from Impressionism with everyday life. They also appear strongly in work by Zuzanna (Zu) Jankowska, who contrasts the symmetry of drawing with pop art.
“The story in “Holiday Courier” is that a UFO lands and tries to make contact, but chooses dogs, in order to win over someone more friendly first, because I’m afraid that if it were people, it could play out very differently. But even among the dogs there is a split,” says Prażmo.
“There’s the painting ‘A brawl in the Japanese Garden’, where there is a confrontation between greyhounds, who are friendly towards the aliens, and various mongrels, who are against it. At the end there is the painting ‘Who Opened the Gates’, so perhaps those aliens didn’t have bad intentions at all and just wanted to contribute to a good cause. I leave that open to interpretation.”
The presence of dogs is also something the exhibition’s curator, Adrian Chorębała, picks up on.
“I’m a great fan of Silesian Park myself and I often go there for walks with my dog. It turned out that my two dogs also ended up in the painting that promotes the exhibition on the poster, ‘A brawl in the Japanese Garden’.”
Chorębała believes that lightness and humour make it easier for some audiences to warm to art.
“I believe art should reach out to people. People often feel like going to a gallery, mixed perhaps with a bit of anxiety, but, for instance, they don’t know that they can do it for free.”
Silesia beyond heavy industry: young art in the coal capital
According to Adrian Chorębała, Silesia is depicted in art today in a completely different way than it was just a dozen or so years ago. Some younger artists are still influenced by the traditions associated with the Janówska Group, and many also draw on the experience of multigenerational mining families.
Mysticism, references to mythology and questions of identity are the main themes explored in the work of Paweł Sobczak. Milan Zientara, in turn, references the Janówska Group and Silesia’s mining past. Abstract figures, fluid boundaries of form and mysticism are the hallmarks of the painting of Ksawery Sajdak, of whom Chorębała says:
“He has created a very interesting world of his own. Using characters and symbols, he presents an imaginary realm which, on the one hand, is very Silesian, and on the other is very contemporary, because it is rooted in gaming.”
According to Chorębała’s, young artists talk about Silesia in a completely different way from their predecessors. The traditional motifs associated with the region – miners, familoki workers’ tenements or characteristic shutters – have not disappeared, but they are no longer the main subject, becoming instead just one part of a broader story about contemporary Silesia.
“You can talk about a Katowice school of graphic art, which focused precisely on that Silesian-ness – the shutters, the miners, the familoki. Now we are moving slightly in the opposite direction. What used to be a classic Silesian landscape is becoming one element in a larger whole.”
He stresses that the way the region is perceived is also changing. Katowice is now building its image above all through culture, and Silesia is increasingly seen as a tourist attraction.
“The rest of Poland sees us as a pleasant place to visit, because we have our own regional idiom. It is not only the language, but also the cuisine and a particular way of being. People from outside always think of Silesia as a very hospitable land,” he adds.
“The Last Days of Vacation” is on at the Rondo Sztuki in Katowice until 15 September.