Paulina Ołowska

Paulina Ołowska (born in Gdańsk) studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), the Fine Arts Academy in Gdańsk and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. She has received scholarships from different art institutions in The Hague, Lisbon, Kitakyushu and Amsterdam. One common feature in her works is the romantic vision of art as a path toward utopia and the belief that «art can change the world.» She is interested in the artistic utopia of modernism, which can be found in the principles of the early Bauhaus (project Bauhaus Yoga, 2001), in the circles of Russian constructivists (Abstract in Process, 2000) and in the creative quest of the European avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. While on a scholarship in Portugal she painted a series of pictures based on fashion photographs from the magazine Ty i Ja / You and Me, a cult magazine for young Polish intellectuals from the 1960s which promoted an optimistic vision of the future, something lacking in our times. In 2015 she received the Kunstpreis Aachen in connection with her exhibition Needle/Nadel. Selected exhibitions: Kunsthalle Basel (2013), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2013), Museum of Modern Art New York (2012), Pinakothek der Moderne München (2009).