PAULINA OLOWSKA

Titled after Olowska’s eponymous video installation, first included in the artist’s 2022 exhibition at KistefosMuseum in Norway, Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas reimagines Slavic mythological deities and demons innew modernist lights. The Mamuna, literally translated from Polish as strangewife, is a female swamp demonclosely associated with rivers, streams, and thickets. Historically characterised as menacing, Olowska portraysher Mamunas as earthly androgynous nymphs, more magical than malicious.

Large-scale paintings, each titled after deities from the Slavic pantheon, feature Olowska’s Mamuna-musesgathered amongst the birch and pine forests of northern Europe. By using found fashion photographs as the basisfor her compositions—from sources such as Polish Vogue, and the photographers Arthur Elgort and BranislavŠimončík—the artist subverts mass media and fine art to recover female mythological figures from their two-dimensional past. In these paintings, women commune with their surroundings, with themselves, and with theviewer.

Throughout the upper two galleries of the exhibition, Mamunas peer out from video installations nestled withinwoodland hollows. Suggestive of gilt antique mirrors, the sculpted frames open a literal window into Olowska’s reconstructed matriarchal world. Kadenówka Bouquet (2023), the only framed painting in the exhibition, is basedon an image taken at the Kadenówka in Rabka, home to Artist House Kadenowka Foundation of which Olowska isfounder and president. Designed in 1930 by Adam Kaden, Kadenówka has since been home to a health spa,tailoring school, hospital accommodation, and is now run by Olowska as an artistic and cultural retreat, hostingmeetings, lectures, and performances.

Further complicating notions of interior and exterior, two ornate chandeliers will feature in the show. Working incollaboration with the artist Jessica Segall as a continuation of Segall’s Nom Nom Ohm series, Olowska’schandeliers are a material representation of her commitment to artisan craft and artistic exchange. Bedecked withceramic and handblown glass mushrooms, pinecones, fruits, vegetables, and potatoes, the chandeliers recreatereciprocal systems and inter-species networks of communication—coined by Dr Suzanne Simard as the WoodWide Web. Research on fungi suggests they can generate electrical signals through their mycelial webs: Olowskasymbolically harnesses this energy to charge her chandeliers and illuminate the exhibition. Here, traditionalsignifiers of bourgeois domesticity, like Olowska’s frames, are made wild through their contact with earthlygoddesses.

In the lower ground floor gallery, Olowska will stage a tableau vivant featuring the costumes from her Kistefosperformance. Arranged in compositional motifs mirroring those found in the artist’s paintings for the exhibition,the handmade mannequins appear corporeal in their softer lighting. The artist’s interest in animism—the beliefthat objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence—informs the exhibition throughout.

Concurrent with her presentation at Pace, Olowska will show new and old work for her exhibition, VisualPersuasion, at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino, opening November 2. At The SerravlesFoundation, Porto, the artist’s iconic performance, The Alphabet, will be staged on November 5 as part of theirlive programme.

Pace Gallery and Paulina Olowska would like to thank the LET IT GO team: Sayuri Chetti; Amy Corall; Yasmin elYassini; Rick Geene; Lou Renard, and Kamil Sznajder. Jessica Segall collaborated with Olowska on thechandeliers, with additional support from Christoph Krane. Photographs by Arthur Elgort, Kacper Kasprzyk, andBranislav Šimončík were the source for paintings in the exhibition. Additional thanks to William Flatmo, LauraGrudniewska, Dorota Kidziak, Monika Kucel, Aleksandra Lewandowska, Viktoriia Semenska, Kate Smith-Raabe,Christen Sveeas and the HAHNEL BUJALSKI SPÓŁKA team for all their help with Squelchy Garden Mules andMamunas.