In frame of  Warsaw Gallery Weekend.
The exhibition "Myths" was awarded the Main Prize by ING Polish Art Foundation:

This year's Main Prize, awarded during Warsaw Gallery Weekend, goes to Karol Radziszewski for his exhibition Myths organized by BWA Warszawa.

A continuation of his monumental series The Gallery of Portrait, Radziszewski’s new body of work convinced the jury in terms of both research as well as the artistic qualities of his work. Taking into account the ambivalent biography of his protagonists, the artist continuously questions the historical portrait genre and further develops his critical inquiry into queer historiography, memory, national identity, and dominant modes of representation – says the jury's verdict.

Seen from afar, Giewont looks like a sleeping knight. Like a man who collapsed under the burden of his own armour, exhaustion and time. The knight breathes in the evening – his chest heaves and delicately shifts the horizon, but this can only be seen by those who seek the image of a lover in the face of the moon and wisdom in myths. Many a time was he seen by Karol Szymanowski, one of the most eminent Polish and European composers of the 20th century and the protagonist of Karol Radziszewski’s new exhibition. The artist reads (and then paints) the life and work of this musical genius, weaving a tale about him in the form of a dense painterly masquerade.

In the world of the composer’s myths Radziszewski sees his home village of Tymoszówka and grand pianos drowned in the nearby pond, a broken reed and broken hearts of young men. Italy, the place of queer archaeologies and sudden coming outs. Of Narcissus and Pan. The Tatras in nature and in highlanders. The Tatras in operas and in ballet masters. Dreams and awakenings. Radziszewski re-creates Szymanowski’s universe with his signature selectivity and imagination. The artist takes an interest in the nocturnality of the story, understatements and mysteries, mirages of memories. He plays with the historical portrait genre, demonstrating its arbitrariness, tendency towards fabrication and mythologisation. Radziszewski constructs a fascinating anti-monument composed of a biography that consists of music and the body.

Aside from Szymanowski’s portraits, an exhibition “about Szymanowski” must contain paintings representing his lovers and partners. The presence of young boys, too young to be deemed equal partners, is inevitable – both for Szymanowski and for those who wish to tell his story. They can be described as “young men” and “ephebes”, but these terms produce the impression as if (our own) language was trying to trick us – as if it was transforming into morning mist by the pond – obscuring, blurring and lending sublimity to an image that perhaps lacks sublimity. If so, let’s call them by their names.

Boris Kochno, a Russian poet, dancer and librettist, is looking at us with his huge eyes. His face, perhaps bearing too much similarity to Derek Jarman, immersed in blue, absorbs some of this colour as well. It is hard to guess the emotions it expresses, despite Radziszewski’s efforts with the use of colour. Things are different in the portrait of Serge Lifar, whose wrathful gaze is part of life and theatre. Or perhaps these two spheres should not be separated, just like Szymanowski is said not to have done? Perhaps one should see someone constantly wearing a costume, stiff, striking a pose, ready to perform. Like Aleksander Szymielewicz, repainted from an erotic photograph (likely the first known homoerotic nudes in Polish history), commissioned by an influential male lover from the atelier of the portraitist Benedykt Dorys. The young physician perished in the Warsaw Uprising, akin to Szymanowski’s two hearts: the artist’s unfinished novel Efebos and his cardiac organ, separated from the rest of the body and hidden in the chapel of the Society of the Sacred Heart in the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw. As in the story about a martyr saint whose body cut into pieces desired to become one in a single fire. As in the legend of a dragon with many heads that shared one stomach.

Further, there is a dark forest and an even darker lake. The home village of Tymoszówka, the treasure of the Szymanowski family and the source of the composer’s prolificacy. A landscape that Radziszewski cannot represent in any other way than in dim half-light. Stars vibrating in the sky will not help – this is a land of darkness and danger. Here, in the nearby waters, the Bolsheviks drowned grand pianos in an act of class revenge, as if they wanted to turn the music off forever. It is here that Szymanowski must work – compose and write, like a hostage of his family roots. This space is populated by fauns, always going in the composer’s oeuvre under the name of Pan. Mythological criminals, gods with goat horns. Their biography is a record of nymph-chasing, rapes, and magic transformations undergone by magic girls. It is better to be a pine tree, a reed or a sound reverberating among rocks than to fall prey to Pan. Perhaps the only hope is offered by transformation – in mythology, on stage and amid forest shadows.

Young male dancers play women’s roles, like in Greek theatre in the past or like today, when gender is an old mask, a symbol of tragedy rather than a meaningful prop. A participant in this game is also Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz – Szymanowski’s cousin, friend and lover. It is for him that the writer observes his nude reflection in the stream. An old photograph, the source of the painting, compels the understanding of this performance as the Dionysia, although in Radziszewski’s piece he rather resembles a thirsty lizard, which would like to reverse the passage of time with a single sip from the source, or an exuvia browned by the sun (product of a metamorphosis, one way or another).

Subject to transformations are Polish highlanders, jumping over a bonfire in ballet stockings. Szymanowski loves the Tatras only on his own terms – flamboyant, translated into French, beyond boring geography. In the geometrical theatrical stage designs of mountain chalets the artist weaves erotic fantasies, disturbingly painted by Radziszewski. Szymanowski torn between desire and resignation, in the company of young, naked highlanders, or perhaps just actors in rented costumes? Maybe these are forest fauns trying to trick a tired man? Phantoms, porcelain figurines, dolls that only react to the pulling of the string?

Szymanowski, devilish and of the Tatras, between a turn-on and disappointment that a myth is nothing but a fabricated tale, and as such it does not have a body.

The female is mixed with the male, the young with the old, the Polish with the foreign, the animal with the human, but transformations are also undergone by the sacred and the blasphemous. Dionysus transformed into John the Baptist, transformed into a shepherd. Radziszewski depicts the spirit that permeates Szymanowski’s work just like Leonardo da Vinci painted the famous Baptist – as a prophet pointing at the cross. But those who fail to notice the sacred tree hidden in the shadow will very quickly guess the role of the raised finger. Is the Rectum a Grave?, asked Leo Bersani in the 1980s, and it seems that Radziszewski refers to this prophecy rather than to Christ’s empty tomb from the Biblical tale.

Szymanowski himself also changes. He is a vampire brought to life, an ageing man with his face painted like in a cabaret, a groomer and a daddy, a master of puppets and a puppet. He is most clearly present in the nude portrait in which he resembles a lumberjack from grindr rather than a spirit of the mountains. Finally, he also appears as Katot – Karol and a cat [“kot” in Polish] – half-boy and half-animal known by his family pet name, a tender linguistic hybrid, a prophecy. A child with a tail kept under wraps for years.

Myths offer the composer a space of escape, emancipation, or even regeneration – heroic tales, unreal romances, health resorts, wisdom (and therefore also magic) of the people. It might seem that throughout all these years the composer is constructing an amulet, a spell cast half for love and half for protection (perhaps always destructive as the result), whose secret lies in nature – humans and non-humans, matter and spirit. Like sweet rush, which Iwaszkiewicz described as smelling of death when rubbed in fingers, and like a body hidden in the birch wood, which is immortal.

In his vast queer genealogy – initiated by the monumental work The Gallery of Portraits (Poczet) and developed in Myths (Mity) through the prism of Szymanowski’s figure – Radziszewski once again asks about the politics of memory and non-memory in official narratives. He reflects on the ways of discussing queer figures without reductive admiration, without turning a blind eye to the dark pages of their ambiguous biographies. On the place of queer desire in normative stories. On approaches to writing the myth of the past without a detriment to the future. The artist’s works also refer to the performative source of myth – storytelling, shadow play, imitation and costume. Grand spectacles begin with a modest tale.

As in the composer’s opera King Roger, the encounter with Szymanowski is an encounter with a mystery: with a figure that emerges from darkness, with oneself as the other, restrained by the social corset. Held captive in the sleeping mountain and in the melody of grand pianos from the bottom of the lake, which can only be heard in dreams.

Michał Grzegorzek

transl. Łukasz Mojsak

Koncert utworów Karola Szymanowskiego w wykonaniu Royal String Quartet z okazji preview wystawy Karola Radziszewskiego „Mity”

In frame of  Warsaw Gallery Weekend.
The exhibition "Myths" was awarded the Main Prize by ING Polish Art Foundation:

This year's Main Prize, awarded during Warsaw Gallery Weekend, goes to Karol Radziszewski for his exhibition Myths organized by BWA Warszawa.

A continuation of his monumental series The Gallery of Portrait, Radziszewski’s new body of work convinced the jury in terms of both research as well as the artistic qualities of his work. Taking into account the ambivalent biography of his protagonists, the artist continuously questions the historical portrait genre and further develops his critical inquiry into queer historiography, memory, national identity, and dominant modes of representation – says the jury's verdict.

Seen from afar, Giewont looks like a sleeping knight. Like a man who collapsed under the burden of his own armour, exhaustion and time. The knight breathes in the evening – his chest heaves and delicately shifts the horizon, but this can only be seen by those who seek the image of a lover in the face of the moon and wisdom in myths. Many a time was he seen by Karol Szymanowski, one of the most eminent Polish and European composers of the 20th century and the protagonist of Karol Radziszewski’s new exhibition. The artist reads (and then paints) the life and work of this musical genius, weaving a tale about him in the form of a dense painterly masquerade.

In the world of the composer’s myths Radziszewski sees his home village of Tymoszówka and grand pianos drowned in the nearby pond, a broken reed and broken hearts of young men. Italy, the place of queer archaeologies and sudden coming outs. Of Narcissus and Pan. The Tatras in nature and in highlanders. The Tatras in operas and in ballet masters. Dreams and awakenings. Radziszewski re-creates Szymanowski’s universe with his signature selectivity and imagination. The artist takes an interest in the nocturnality of the story, understatements and mysteries, mirages of memories. He plays with the historical portrait genre, demonstrating its arbitrariness, tendency towards fabrication and mythologisation. Radziszewski constructs a fascinating anti-monument composed of a biography that consists of music and the body.

Aside from Szymanowski’s portraits, an exhibition “about Szymanowski” must contain paintings representing his lovers and partners. The presence of young boys, too young to be deemed equal partners, is inevitable – both for Szymanowski and for those who wish to tell his story. They can be described as “young men” and “ephebes”, but these terms produce the impression as if (our own) language was trying to trick us – as if it was transforming into morning mist by the pond – obscuring, blurring and lending sublimity to an image that perhaps lacks sublimity. If so, let’s call them by their names.

Boris Kochno, a Russian poet, dancer and librettist, is looking at us with his huge eyes. His face, perhaps bearing too much similarity to Derek Jarman, immersed in blue, absorbs some of this colour as well. It is hard to guess the emotions it expresses, despite Radziszewski’s efforts with the use of colour. Things are different in the portrait of Serge Lifar, whose wrathful gaze is part of life and theatre. Or perhaps these two spheres should not be separated, just like Szymanowski is said not to have done? Perhaps one should see someone constantly wearing a costume, stiff, striking a pose, ready to perform. Like Aleksander Szymielewicz, repainted from an erotic photograph (likely the first known homoerotic nudes in Polish history), commissioned by an influential male lover from the atelier of the portraitist Benedykt Dorys. The young physician perished in the Warsaw Uprising, akin to Szymanowski’s two hearts: the artist’s unfinished novel Efebos and his cardiac organ, separated from the rest of the body and hidden in the chapel of the Society of the Sacred Heart in the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw. As in the story about a martyr saint whose body cut into pieces desired to become one in a single fire. As in the legend of a dragon with many heads that shared one stomach.

Further, there is a dark forest and an even darker lake. The home village of Tymoszówka, the treasure of the Szymanowski family and the source of the composer’s prolificacy. A landscape that Radziszewski cannot represent in any other way than in dim half-light. Stars vibrating in the sky will not help – this is a land of darkness and danger. Here, in the nearby waters, the Bolsheviks drowned grand pianos in an act of class revenge, as if they wanted to turn the music off forever. It is here that Szymanowski must work – compose and write, like a hostage of his family roots. This space is populated by fauns, always going in the composer’s oeuvre under the name of Pan. Mythological criminals, gods with goat horns. Their biography is a record of nymph-chasing, rapes, and magic transformations undergone by magic girls. It is better to be a pine tree, a reed or a sound reverberating among rocks than to fall prey to Pan. Perhaps the only hope is offered by transformation – in mythology, on stage and amid forest shadows.

Young male dancers play women’s roles, like in Greek theatre in the past or like today, when gender is an old mask, a symbol of tragedy rather than a meaningful prop. A participant in this game is also Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz – Szymanowski’s cousin, friend and lover. It is for him that the writer observes his nude reflection in the stream. An old photograph, the source of the painting, compels the understanding of this performance as the Dionysia, although in Radziszewski’s piece he rather resembles a thirsty lizard, which would like to reverse the passage of time with a single sip from the source, or an exuvia browned by the sun (product of a metamorphosis, one way or another).

Subject to transformations are Polish highlanders, jumping over a bonfire in ballet stockings. Szymanowski loves the Tatras only on his own terms – flamboyant, translated into French, beyond boring geography. In the geometrical theatrical stage designs of mountain chalets the artist weaves erotic fantasies, disturbingly painted by Radziszewski. Szymanowski torn between desire and resignation, in the company of young, naked highlanders, or perhaps just actors in rented costumes? Maybe these are forest fauns trying to trick a tired man? Phantoms, porcelain figurines, dolls that only react to the pulling of the string?

Szymanowski, devilish and of the Tatras, between a turn-on and disappointment that a myth is nothing but a fabricated tale, and as such it does not have a body.

The female is mixed with the male, the young with the old, the Polish with the foreign, the animal with the human, but transformations are also undergone by the sacred and the blasphemous. Dionysus transformed into John the Baptist, transformed into a shepherd. Radziszewski depicts the spirit that permeates Szymanowski’s work just like Leonardo da Vinci painted the famous Baptist – as a prophet pointing at the cross. But those who fail to notice the sacred tree hidden in the shadow will very quickly guess the role of the raised finger. Is the Rectum a Grave?, asked Leo Bersani in the 1980s, and it seems that Radziszewski refers to this prophecy rather than to Christ’s empty tomb from the Biblical tale.

Szymanowski himself also changes. He is a vampire brought to life, an ageing man with his face painted like in a cabaret, a groomer and a daddy, a master of puppets and a puppet. He is most clearly present in the nude portrait in which he resembles a lumberjack from grindr rather than a spirit of the mountains. Finally, he also appears as Katot – Karol and a cat [“kot” in Polish] – half-boy and half-animal known by his family pet name, a tender linguistic hybrid, a prophecy. A child with a tail kept under wraps for years.

Myths offer the composer a space of escape, emancipation, or even regeneration – heroic tales, unreal romances, health resorts, wisdom (and therefore also magic) of the people. It might seem that throughout all these years the composer is constructing an amulet, a spell cast half for love and half for protection (perhaps always destructive as the result), whose secret lies in nature – humans and non-humans, matter and spirit. Like sweet rush, which Iwaszkiewicz described as smelling of death when rubbed in fingers, and like a body hidden in the birch wood, which is immortal.

In his vast queer genealogy – initiated by the monumental work The Gallery of Portraits (Poczet) and developed in Myths (Mity) through the prism of Szymanowski’s figure – Radziszewski once again asks about the politics of memory and non-memory in official narratives. He reflects on the ways of discussing queer figures without reductive admiration, without turning a blind eye to the dark pages of their ambiguous biographies. On the place of queer desire in normative stories. On approaches to writing the myth of the past without a detriment to the future. The artist’s works also refer to the performative source of myth – storytelling, shadow play, imitation and costume. Grand spectacles begin with a modest tale.

As in the composer’s opera King Roger, the encounter with Szymanowski is an encounter with a mystery: with a figure that emerges from darkness, with oneself as the other, restrained by the social corset. Held captive in the sleeping mountain and in the melody of grand pianos from the bottom of the lake, which can only be heard in dreams.

Michał Grzegorzek

transl. Łukasz Mojsak

Koncert utworów Karola Szymanowskiego w wykonaniu Royal String Quartet z okazji preview wystawy Karola Radziszewskiego „Mity”