Agata PIETRASIKChercheuse invitée

Septembre - Novembre 2019

Agata Pietrasik graduated from Freie Universität in Berlin with a doctoral dissertation titled “Art in Crisis - Artistic Practice from Poland 1939-1949”. Her research concerns early post-war modernism in Western and Eastern Europe and addresses the questions of ethics in art. Currently, she is researching exhibitions organized in Europe between 1940 and 1949 to represent the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Her scholarship was supported by the DAAD, Polish Ministry of Culture and German Forum for Art History in Paris.

Publications

• Czas debat: antologia krytyki artystycznej z lat 1945-1954. Upowszechnianie kultury i mecenat państwowy [Time of Debate. Anthology of Artistic Criticism from 1945-1959. Dissemination of Culture and State Patronage]. Edited by Agata Pietrasik and Piotr Słodkowski. Vol. 1, Warsaw: Fundacja Kultura Miejsca: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych.
• Czas debat: antologia krytyki artystycznej z lat 1945-1954. Realizm i formalism [Time of Debates. Anthology of Artistic Criticism from 1945-1959. Realism and Formalism]. Edited by Agata Pietrasik and Piotr Słodkowski. Vol. 2, Warsaw: Fundacja Kultura Miejsca : Akademia Sztuk Pięknych.
• Czas debat: antologia krytyki artystycznej z lat 1945-1954. Wektory geografii artystycznej [Time of Debate. Anthology of Artistic Criticism from 1945-1959. Vectors of Artistic geography]. Edited by Piotr Słodkowski and Agata Pietrasik. Vol. 3, Warsaw: Fundacja Kultura Miejsca: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych.
• Une remise en scène des avant-gardes : Le retour à l'abstraction d'Henryk Berlewi / Restaging the Avant-garde: Henryk Berlewi’s Return to Abstract Art. in: OwnReality 8, 2014, URL: https://www.perspectivia.net/receive/pnet_mods_00000095
• “Abstraction & Figuration in the Auschwitz Memorial From Consensus to Dissensus.” In Die Transformation Der Lager, Annäherungen an Die Orte Nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen, edited by Annika Wienert and Alexandra Klei, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011.
• “Traversing Monumentality - Successive Designs for the Auschwitz Monument,” in Moore and Auschwitz, ed. Ewa Toniak, Warsaw: Instytut Adama Mickiewicza 2010.

Project

Aesthetic Interregnum: Artistic practices of the Immediate Postwar in Eastern and Western Europe

The year 1945 is well established as one of the most self-evident historical turning points, which organises not only a newly globalised regime of politics, but also the field of art, dividing it into pre-war and post-war practices, the first being associated with the activity of the historical avant-garde and the latter with a more elusive notion of ‘contemporary art’.

However the notion of postwar is still much debated in respect to its actual duration and meaning, pointing to the fluidity of the term. The artistic production coming out of the 1940s and the 1950s is exemplary of such fluidity and variability. However paradoxically, the period is commonly described in European art history with rigid and antithetical terms, such as “abstraction” or “realism”, or politically “engaged” or “disengaged”art.

The project advances an understanding of the postwar period of artistic production using the methodological framework of interregnum, redefined by Antonio Gramsci as a form of crisis, consisting “in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. The task of the project extends however beyond discussing aesthetic phantoms into analyzing vital potentialities which emerged from this space of interregnum.

The scope of my research extends from the first unprecedented institutional exhibitions of the evidence of war crimes and atrocities, such as “Warsaw Accuses”  (Warsaw, 1945) and “Crimes hitlériens” (Paris, 1945), to individual artistic testimonies by artists who experienced the war in Eastern Europe, followed by close analysis of the reception of surrealism in Eastern Europe following the War, and it’s embrace as an aesthetic paradigm par excellence for artists dealing with the wartime experience.