Paulina Olowska’s seductive portraits of women rethink eroticism

Paulina Olowska has spent her career as an artist focusing on women, and their perspectives, in a world that considers them objects. Women feature in his fashion-inspired paintings, which often use magazine photo shoots as source material. His portraits often show his female subjects in sharp focus while the world around them dissolves into a blurry, painterly abstraction. This work earned her notoriety in the art world: in 2022, the artist joined the roster of Pace Gallery, which is currently showing her first solo exhibition, “Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas,” at its London location through January 6 of 2024.

Olowska’s Pace debut coincides with an extensive show, “Visual Persuasion,” at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, creating an important moment for the artist. In “Visual Persuasion,” the artist turned to curating, presenting a sample of her own work—both new commissions and pieces from the Fondazione’s collection—alongside historical works by other artists that speak to the commodification and liberation of women’s bodies. Installation, videos and even performances complement exuberant wall-based works like Olowska’s seductive (2020), which portrays a couple in the midst of flirtation: an elegant woman holding out her hand to be kissed by an adoring man.

“Visual Persuasion,” on view through February 25, 2024, spans the entire Fondazione’s exhibition space, a rarity for the museum, as explained by exhibit curator Irene Calderoni (who is also chief curator of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo). a tour A visual aesthetic of the 70s recurs in many of the works: neon lights, allusions to soft-porn cinema and go-go boots, for example, all appear. Although Olowska was only born in 1976, she cited the decade as the source of her “visual education,” she explained in an interview with Artsy. “I love it, because it had a spirit of freedom,” he said.

That freedom seems to be the pole star of the artist in an exhibition that considers the possibilities and limitations of representing female sexuality. In the process of exploring these ideas, the artist focuses on several artists whose works are less well known than her own. Maja Berezowska, for example, was a Polish painter of the early 20th century, whose erotic works on paper often depict women in charge of their own pleasure. In the exhibition, his work appears in dialogue with several large paintings by Olowska with reused images of Vivaan erotic magazine for women that was published between 1973 and 1980.

Fleshy moments of large-scale, blurry, soft-focus pleasure are shown in these works. Sketches of nudes are scratched across the top of the images in black paint, along with verses from poems by Maria Pawlikowska Jasnorewska (sometimes known as “the Polish Sappho”). But while Viva—which had serious critics, and hired Anna Wintour as a fashion editor—was aimed at women, published and marketed to men. These wall-spanning monuments to women’s sexuality attempt to capture the joy of intimacy from a female perspective, while also criticizing male society’s aestheticization of women’s pleasure.

This embrace of contradictions is evidenced through the juxtaposition of Olowska’s softly contoured female sex appeal with the raw and monstrous aspects of flesh explored by other artists in the exhibition. In the same room as the series of Viva– inspired paintings is the sculpture of Berlinde de Bruyckere The Headless Woman (2004), a wax sculpture resembling a deformed human body with layers of skin and flesh falling on top of each other. It is also sharing the space Nice Boobsa 2011 sculpture by Sarah Lucas in which breast-shaped protrusions made of stuffed nylon stockings protrude through a metal grid, creating a surprising globular mass.

Neon is another theme of the exhibition, which dedicates an entire corridor to signage. The medium has particular resonance for the artist, who grew up with socialist versions of illuminated signs in Poland, then part of the Eastern Bloc. “They weren’t made to advertise, but to express ideas,” he said, recalling charming examples of signs from his childhood with messages like “see you at the movies.” Other eye-catching neon signs, he said, spread public service announcements about the importance of hand washing or dental hygiene, a stark contrast to the commercial uses neon has in the West. For Olowska, neon and women’s bodies are similarly used in advertising, as hollow, commercialized emblems of desire.

With its inclusion of works made in the past 50 years, as well as Olowska’s own use of 1970s aesthetics, “Visual Persuasion” could feel like a nostalgia trip. But the artist explained that she hoped to use the lessons of history to construct alternative visions of eroticism, rather than simply accepting the status quo. “What we have now in this industry doesn’t interest me as much,” she said of representations of sexuality in contemporary art. “This show is really about: How are we going to create eroticism? How do we want to create in the future? So I thought: ‘Let’s look at the past’”.