Anna Ciba at Fundacja Arton
The pretty much-emptiness of this exhibition eerily befits an artist who disappeared with no a trace in 2018, just about three a long time after she stopped making art amid struggles with schizophrenia identified in the mid-1980s. Titled “When you seem into my eyes, you see what?,” the exhibit includes documentation of Ciba’s short output as a college student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw from 1982 to 1987, as perfectly as a handful of pictures of her at the time and two pics taken not long prior to she went lacking. Most intriguing is a assortment of exhibition photographs displayed inside of a vitrine: daring, glyphlike marks in black-and-white acrylic on large sheets hung unfastened in space-sized installations. Just one photograph depicts a sparse composition of angular traces that variously resemble an arrow, a check mark, and a triangular peak versus a crimson history that curator Zuzanna Wilska suspects was stitched alongside one another from the pink bottom band of a lot of Polish flags.
Wilska argues for Ciba’s function as a crucial determine in Polish art in the 1980s, pointing to her participation in important group demonstrates in Warsaw that encapsulated an emphatic switch to painting all through that ten years. While many friends channeled collective exhaustion with equally the language of the avant-garde and a restrictive socialist routine into expressive, often absurd figuration akin to the Neue Wilde, Ciba worked in escalating isolation and cultivated a rather distinctive pared-down and abstracted symbology. As rarely any of Ciba’s get the job done exists now (a pair of doodles gifted to a good friend and exhibited in this article bear minor resemblance to her painting), the virtually vacant exhibition asserts Ciba’s existence by generating her absence product. The work of preserving archives, to which the Arton Foundation is dedicated, occasionally has significantly less to do with filling in gaps than insisting on the holes that unsettle canonized versions of artwork history.
— Camila McHugh
