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curator: Dorotea Fotivec

The exhibition „Andrzej Lachowicz – A Form of Consciousness“ is organized as part of the „Artist on Vacation 2018. / Valamar“ project.

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Andrzej Lachowicz's work is based on conceptual art, and it is marked by intellectual independence, a critical stance towards one-sided views on the role of the conceptualization of the creative process, and transformation of the everyday. He mostly worked in conceptual photography, and he created in the media of film, graphics, drawings and painting. He was born in 1939 in Vilnius, Lithuania. From 1957 to 1960 he studied in Poland, at the AGH Faculty of Science and Technology in Kraków, and from 1960 he continued his studies at the State Higher School for Fine Arts in Wrocław, which he finished in 1965. His contribution to art theory and the development of contemporary art in Poland is great, especially due to his theoretical writing and co-founding of the PERMAFO independent gallery. He was an organiser of the International Drawing Biennial of Drawing in Wrocław from 1978 to 1995.

His works are not narrative, they are focused on comparison and analysis, they are conceptual actions, such as series of works Energy of the Fall or Slantwise. In theTopologies series, Lachowicz overlapped photo-negatives of clenched fists, with which he gets abstract compositions. The mathematical concept of topology marks and studies those features of geometrical objects which stay unchanged (invariant) when shapes deform by stretching, turning or squishing. He also studies the relation of area and border. In such a way, art is also an unchanging whole despite its different individual transformations which are happening around it. Shadow is a name of the series of works which Lachowicz created in photography and video since the 1960s. In it, an artist brings in the character of the all present, invisible watchmen, as one of the repressed fears of contemporary civilisation.

Lachowicz is one of the founders of one of the most notable independent galleries in Poland - PERMAFO. It was opened in Wrocław in 1970 by Andrzej Lachowicz and Natalia LL, his long term partner and one of the most important conceptual artists in Poland, artists Zbigniew Dłubak and art critic Antoni Dzieduszycki. The title is short for "permanent" and "photography", and the gallery is oriented foremost on photography, and it was active until 1981. Many artists from local countries exhibited in it, as well as "Western" artists, conceptual artists and performers, including Joseph Beuys, Tibor Hajas, Joseph Kossuth, Jiří Valoch and others. Andrzej Lachowicz passed away in 2015 in Wrocław.

Organizers: Institute for the Research of the Avant-Garde, Marinko Sudac Collection, Poreč Open University, Valamar Riviera d.d.