Julita Wójcik

Starting in the second half of the 1990s, many European artists have become fascinated with modern design and architecture. Artists such as Jorge Pardo, Andrea Zittel, Martin Boyce, Toby Peterson, Lucy McKenzie, or Pia Rönicke – often referred by the critics as the 'neomodernists' – recall in their art the classic modernistic projects of the late 1950s and the 1960s in the atmosphere of nostalgia for a utopia that has become a thing of the past. Similar tropes can be found in the art of Slovenia's artist Marjetica Potr ć whose vision of modernism was shaped in the post-war realities of eastern Europe. In an essay Paradise Lost? published in the issue no. 2 of the art magazine Piktogram, David Crowley so described the background of her art: “During the late 1950s the communist states of the Eastern Bloc sought to modernise at breakneck speed. To shake off associations of violence and irrationality, Stalin's successors recast themselves as rational technocrats. The world was to be made anew in concrete, glass, and steel. (…) Over the course of the 1960s, Eastern Bloc cities vied to produce high architectural drama in the form of inter-stellar TV towers, colossal mega-structures as monumental, high-rise housing schemes”.

The iconography of everyday life of the world in which they grew up is often present in the practice of the generation of artists to which Julita Wójcik belongs. Painter Rafał Bujnowski comments on the reality of present-day Poland in the context of the recent past and the objects inhabiting it. For multimedia artist Maurycy Gomulicki, collecting the classic examples of the Polish design and kitsch of the 1960s and 1970s has become an inspiration for many diverse artistic projects. Paulina Ołowska, painter and author of installations, samples graphic and design art motifs of the period found in old colour magazines or traces their remnants in the real city space. Her present exhibition at the Foksal Gallery Foundation revitalises the world of the 1960s' street neon signs, and the proceeds from the sale of the exhibited works are to go towards renovating one of Warsaw's best known such signs, the so called “volleyball player”.

Julita Wójcik's first serious project, co-authored by Ołowska and Lucy McKenzie, was called Dream of a Provincial Girl. Under that title, in a flat rented by the artists, a series of exhibitions took place in 2000 (of works by themselves and by invited artists from various countries). Wójcik's identification marks include provincialism perceived as a value, references to a specific space and its privacy, the glorification of the banal activities that everyday life is composed of, or the inclusion in artistic projects of motifs from her own biography.

In one of the interviews with the artist (“Gazeta Wyborcza”, 25 February 2000), we read, “Crocheting is the typical occupation of a provincial girl. It requires patience, while being soft and nice. The time for it is in the winter”.

Julita crocheted the model of the 'wavy block' Poland's longest apartment block building, a zigzag structure developed in the years 1970-1973 and located at 4, 6, 8, 10 Obrońców Wybrzeża Street in Gdańsk, during the six long winter months at the turn of 2005 and 2006. She used several kilograms of white and pink crewel bought from an haberdasher's store located at Obrońców 4D. The unity of place and material was retained. The knitwear architectural form is exhibited on a wooden plinth-table designed by the artist that follows the curvature of the 'wavy block'. A second object presented at the Kordegarda exhibition is the model of an apartment block at 4/6 A Mściwoja Street in Gdynia. The high-rise building is a typical elongated cube similar to the thousands of other such blocks comprising the cityscape of the majority of Poland's cities. What makes it special? The fact that it used to be the artist's home – she spent her childhood and adolescence in the apartment no. 9 and the building has sentimental value for her.

Julita Wójcik's show at the Kordegarda is a second exhibition of the Room With a View series. The artist has hung designer curtains in the gallery's windows – screen-printed with a mapping of the 'wavy block's' architectural plans. Other compositions featuring fragments of the building's designs appear on the walls in wooden frames. Those elements, as well as a potted flower placed in the corner, serve to make the official gallery space more intimate and homelike. The strategy is typical for Wójcik's practice. In 2001, she transformed the Zachęta's Mały Salon into a kitchen, and in 2005 transformed the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok into a living room filled with crochets and objects bringing to mind the local context of a multicultural borderland. In the present case, the measures aimed at making the gallery space more familiar refer to the effort undertaken every day by the apartment-block dwellers – the struggle between individual tastes (traditionally bourgeois or ludic) and the austerity of modernistic architecture. The 'wavy block' is a gallery-access building – you enter the apartments from a gallery in the front, and the back features rows of balconies. Both façades have been visibly transformed by the inhabitants – the originally mounted simple doors have been replaced with more ornate ones (and tighter ones at the same time, so it is a struggle not only to 'improve' the buildings aesthetics but also its functionality), and many of the vaulted balconies have been glazed and turned into loggias to expand the floor area. The tendency towards individualising the unified buildings is not strange to the management either – the 'wavy block' has recently been painted in infantile pink stripes which Wójcik's model carefully recreates. The nearby buildings, in turn, have been covered with enlarged projections of children's animal drawings. While, on the one hand, those measures or procedures are easy to understand, on the other, this peculiar 'humanisation' of the austerity of socialistic modernism often violates the principles of stylistic decorum. The mixing of conventions does not always help the building' aesthetics. Wójcik refers to this complex issue in her video View Maker which is a recording of a performance action she carried out in Gdańsk in 2004. Dressed in a housecoat and a headscarf, she 'paints' the grey walls of the apartment blocks (whose original greyness has over time been covered with a layer of city grime). Her hand is guided by the instructions of an off-screen supervisor making sure that the paint fills evenly the marked-out fields.

Julita Wójcik draws her inspirations from her immediate surroundings (the apartment, the city). She looks sympathetically at the 'ugly blocks' still perceiving in them the values resulting from the original modernistic concept of architecture, as well as at the manifestations of apartment-block life (the effort put by the tenants into creating intimate spaces, the individual stories told by them). The exhibition's title, With Hope and Impatience, is a somewhat ironic reference to the feelings of the people who in the early 1970s waited to be assigned a flat in Poland' largest apartment block building (the 'wavy block' is 700 metres long, has 11 floors and 5,500 inhabitants!). It also speaks about the ambitions of the architect – author of the design of the Przymorze estate, an urban planning concept that certainly makes an impression on a visitor – one of admiration mixed with horror. According to the literature, the architect had to wait (with hope and impatience) for ten years before his vision was finally turned into reality. These days he reportedly refuses to comment on his creation.

Julita Wójcik's exhibition at the Kordegarda is yet another statement in the debate on the future of the architecture of the so called 'socialist modernism'. It is also a narrative about an architecture infused with a multitude of meanings, and an ironic-sentimental journey through a landscape remembered from one's childhood.

curator Magda Kardasz

Pressetext

Julita Wójcik. With Hope and Impatience
Julita Wojcik
Kurator: Magda Kardasz
Ort: Kordegarda Gallery