Dimensions: 110 x 78 cm
Signature: signed on the back: Paulina Ołowska / "Sweater - Blouse" / 2010; on the stretcher a paper sticker from Metro Pictures gallery in New York with a description of the work and two paper stickers from Phillips auction house in New York
Provenance
Poland, private collection New York, Philips, auction 25.09.2024, item 224 USA, private collection New York, Metro Pictures Gallery
The work Sweterek-bluzeczka (2010) alludes to Paulina Olowska's characteristic fascination with fashion photographs that recycled Western style in communist Poland. In the year of the offered painting, the artist opened a solo exhibition "Applied Fantastic" at New York's Metro Pictures gallery, which included a series of paintings, collages and wool sweaters. The canvases featured beautiful models in fancy sweaters, painted in a slightly Pop Art manner. The leitmotif of the aforementioned exhibition was the theme of infatuation with Western consumerism, and in the paintings themselves the atmosphere of fashion "from behind the Iron Curtain" is clearly discernible. In the painting Sweterek-bluzeczka (Sweater Blouse), Paulina Olowska goes further than fashion photoshoots of the 60s and 70s, making the heroine of the painting a laughing teenage girl. The work evokes a photo from a family album, a memory of a carefree time, a portrait of a joyful childhood. Full of nostalgia, perhaps even autobiographical in nature, the painting reflects Olowska's continuing interest in the role of utilitarian objects and fashion as carriers of social codes and aspirations.
