Ballads and Romances

The show Ballads and Romances takes us on a trip to a world of sad stories and grotesque. Its authors are artists who are only entering the scene, but using a sophisticated imagination and a characteristic language. All of them share with us the pleasures and offences of narration. Storytelling adopts various forms here - from song, through drawings inspired by cartoon characters, paintings heavy on detail, to sculptures struggling with their own form.

'Old age is not joy, honesty is not a value', Ballady i Romanse sing, accidentally describing very aptly the mood of the pieces featured in the show. The different works share a fascination with the fragility of matter and meaning, the fleetingness of time and form, the poetry of failure, disintegration, and destruction. At the same time, their authors are masters of creating fiction, and art seems to occupy them as a domain of sophisticated artificiality. The pieces exude a palpable air of misfortune, here is a collection of the most bizarre scenarios of failure, of everyday traps and silent disasters. At the same time, it is a world of a vital imagination that busies itself with inventing these grotesque puns.

An aged gallery and the top floor of an old tenement are without a doubt a good background for such a presentation. There are few things modern here, the plot seems to be developing in a parallel, dusty reality, in old costumes, amid movement-constraining cobwebs. Human figures look like pieces of furniture deformed by years of use. The figures in Kowalski's paintings, frozen in timeless, circus-like poses, or Brzeski's deformed, baroque busts, freeze in the least expected moment, turning into styleless hybrids. Ballady i Romanse play on household articles - an Ikea watering can, an old sugar bowl, a communist-era electric kettle, Mulan uses a ball pen and crayons, and the whole forms a seemingly naive ballad about a romance with ghosts from an old drawer.

The pieces featured in the exhibition have been made over the last couple of years. Mulan's drawings are from his school days. Tomasz Kowalski's works, in turn, and Ballady i Romanse's songs, have been produced in recent months, some specially for the Raster show. Gathered in one place at one time, they are an attempt to present a broader context of art that has grown 'weary with reality', its allusions to amateur practices, outsider techniques, home and 'naive' art, but also its peculiar musicality and its references to classic academic notions and traditions.

Part of the project is a debut record by Ballady i Romanse, to be published by Raster at end-October. Its premiere, accompanied by a joint performance with The Complainer & The Complainers in the loft of a downtown tenement at Pankiewicza 3, has been scheduled for 25 October.

Ballady i Romanse Music group founded in 2007 by Zuzanna Wrońska, co-founder and keyboard player of Meble. She was then joined by Barbara Wrońska, vocalist and leader of Pustki. Their first cut together, recorded under the moniker of Siostry Wrońskie, was Ballady i Romanse for the Broniewski compilation (Raster, 2005). The sisters write the lyrics (Zuzanna), the music (together), and take care of production (Barbara). Both are graduates of music academies. They draw inspiration from Polish women singers, and their lyrics usually describe ordinary, often sad, situations from real life. They use various analogue instruments and household appliances-cum-instruments, but also sampled backgrounds. For stage performances, they team up with Grzegorz Śluz (Pustki) on drums, Radek Łukasiewicz on bass guitar, and Wojtek Makowski on guitar.

Olaf Brzeski (born 1975 in Poznań) - author of videos, installations, and ceramic sculptures, creator of fantasy characters, fascinated with villains and forms forged in the process of violence. He graduated from Wrocław Academy of Fine Arts with a degree in sculpture (2000). Collaborates with Galeria Czarna in Warsaw.

Tomasz Kowalski (born in 1984 in Szczebrzeszyn) - painter, draftsman, author of absurd three-dimensional devices. He was raised in an artistic family, and his works betray a sympathy for old art. He is currently completing painting studies at Cracow Academy of Fine Arts.

Mulan (born 1981 in Biłgoraj) - author of obsessive drawings made during classes in primary school and then vocational school. He later attended an arts college in Zamość, where he met Tomasz Kowalski, who prepared his debut exhibition at Artpol in Cracow (2007). He currently studies sculpture at Lublin University and has been devoting his creative powers to three-dimensional forms. He reportedly fluently speaks backwards and has designed his own alphabet.

Ballads and Romances

Künstler: Olaf Brzeski, Tomasz Kowalski, Mulan