Kwiek, Paweł.

[POLISH UNOFFICIAL ART – CONCEPTUAL ART] Pawel Kwiek, "Objawienie". Catalog and original invitation card for the exhibition at Mała Galeria in May-June 1983.

Warsaw: Mała Galeria, 1983. Square octavo (17.5 × 19 cm). Original staple-stitched photo-illustrated wrappers with six leaves of text and illustrations to rectos and versos. With a single card exhibition invitation measuring 15 × 10 cm, printed to recto only. Very good; light toning to edges; the card with old crease barely visible on recto. Item #54603

Scarce catalog for an exhibition by one of the first Polish video artists, and a key representative of the Polish neo-avant-garde, Pawel Kwiek (1951–2022). The exhibition showing “52 drawings” occupied with the subject of “the visible and the invisible” opened in May 1983 at Mała Galeria in Warsaw. A filmmaker by training, Kwiek studied at the Łódź Film School where he co-founded the Workshop of Film Form (Warsztat Formy Filmowej) in 1970–1977. A key formation of experimental film and video art, the Workshop of Film Form interrogated the relationship between cinema, politics, and contemporary art, while also re-discovering the Polish pre-war avant-garde. Kwiek would go on to lecture at the school in 1978–1981, until the announcement of Martial Law in Poland. In 1980, Kwiek underwent a spiritual revelation and a religious conversion, with the present exhibition title “Revelation” referring to this experience. The artist would go on to practice what he called “sacred avant-garde art” and show his work at many Church exhibitions during the Martial Law as well as at Mała Galeria, a conceptualist photography and media gallery which operated in Warsaw in 1977–2006 and continually showed Kwiek’s work throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

See: Marika Kuźmicz and Łukasz Ronduda, Workshop of the Film Form. Warsztat Formy Filmowej (2018), and 1, 2, 3... Cinematographer’s Exercises. Paweł Kwiek. Photography, Film, Video (Warsaw, 2013).

As of June, 2025, KVK, OCLC show one copy outside of Poland, and none in North America.

Price: €250.00

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