TERESA ŻARNOWER: SOLO EXHIBITION [WARSAW GALLERY WEEKEND]

On the occasion of Warsaw Gallery Weekend, Import Export will present works by influential Polish avant-garde artist Teresa Żarnower (1897–1949).

Following research since Żarnower’s unexplained death, art historians located a cache of work preserved by her family in New York. It is these emigrée paintings that hold Żarnower’s legacy, rather than her radical Constructivist sculptures or photomontages she was known for in life. A belief in the power of art to defend peace against fascism fueled her early work, yet the failure of Modernism’s utopia and guilt as a Jewish survivor of war encouraged an emotional idiom influenced by Surrealism. Employing vocabulary in jarring or somber colours, she used the expressive power of sinewy line to excise internal torment. The poetics of lyrical eroticism – patterns flow into bodies, voluptuous or contorted with beseechingly outstretched hands – are juxtaposed with symbols of her destroyed past. These remarkable creations convey her despair as witness to cataclysmic events of WW2 and the crumbling world.