“The Pseudogroups of Stefan Krygier” Exhibition
Green Point Projects
[Image: Stefan Krygier "Three Ladies" (1979) oil on canvas, 70 x 60 cm]
This event has ended.
Green Point Projects, a new cultural initiative in Brooklyn founded in April 2017 and located in a repurposed warehouse in an industrial part of Greenpoint apresent a new exhibition: “The Pseudogroups of Stefan Krygier”, carrying the title which references the concept of “pseudogroups” defined by the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Golab (1902-1980). This is the first major show of the artist in the United States. The exhibition is curated by Marek Bartelik.
[Public opening: Friday, May 11, 2018, 6-9 pm (GPP, 27 Gem St., Brooklyn, New York, on the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint), on view till Saturday, June 30, 2018]
Stefan Krygier (1923 – 1997) was a Polish painter, sculptor, graphic designer, architect, and art educator. Throughout his career Krygier’s work evolved stylistically, from the early works inspired by cubism, constructivism and the legendary Polish Constructivist Wladyslaw Strzemiński’s unism and solarism to tachist paintings, to his mature kinetic special compositions and his late “simultaneous” paintings.
This exhibition will focus on two groups of Krygier’s works—sculptures, drawings and prints from the 1960s and paintings and installations 1970s. The former works were inspired by the artist’s visit to the Jewish cemetery in Prague, Czechoslovakia; the latter are geometric abstractions a large special installation entitled Center of Form’s Condensations, which fuse constructivism and surrealism in a highly original, whimsical fashion.
As curator of the exhibition Marek Bartelik writes in the exhibition catalog: “(…)
The geometric paintings produced in the 1970s included in this exhibition are among Krygier’s most “minimalistic” works, overall reminiscent of [Strzeminski’s] unism—and of Concrete Art, which, as its founder Theo von Doesburg insisted, had to rely on line, color, and plane as the most “concrete” elements in painting.
Pointing out to the optical and kinetic effects in Krygier’s works, Bartelik elaborated:
Their purpose is not to trick the eye and brain (as in the case of Bridget Riley or Victor Vasarely), but to endow his works with a special dynamism without compromising their planer and integrity as flat surfaces. Furthermore, when Krygier experimented with the arrangements of geometric shapes, he didn’t intend to distort the viewer’s perception by endowing static artworks with the impression of movement, but, quite the opposite: he wanted to sharpen our vision and, at the same time, put it in “quotation marks,” as if to say that it had to be connected to previous optical experiences and their interpretations.”
The exhibition cast light on innovative aspects of Polish art, which in many ways overlapped with similar experiments with bridging art with science and technology in Western Europe and America. The show features a site-specific version of Center of Form’s Condensations, mid-1970s, specially configured for Green Point Projects.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-size catalogue, with a critical essay by Marek Bartelik and a personal reflection by the artist’s daughter, Monika Krygier.
Stefan Krygier’s works are in the collections of, among other museums, the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Szczecin, and the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, all in Poland.
Media
Schedule
from May 11, 2018 to June 30, 2018
Opening Reception on 2018-05-11 from 18:00 to 21:00