{"id":2226,"date":"2023-09-21T15:39:55","date_gmt":"2023-09-21T13:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/?p=2226"},"modified":"2023-09-21T15:39:55","modified_gmt":"2023-09-21T13:39:55","slug":"kus-libera-thomas-erben-gallery-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/?p=2226","title":{"rendered":"Kus + Libera, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Agata Kus, Zbigniew Libera<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Kus + Libera<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>September 7 &#8211; October 21, 2023\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-wordpress wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-thomas-erben-gallery\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"XVdUyClSqQ\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thomaserben.com\/exhibitions\/11189-copy\/\">Kus + Libera<\/a><\/blockquote><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);\" title=\"&#8220;Kus + Libera&#8221; &#8212; Thomas Erben Gallery\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thomaserben.com\/exhibitions\/11189-copy\/embed\/#?secret=PXpgiZXKCT#?secret=XVdUyClSqQ\" data-secret=\"XVdUyClSqQ\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Opening reception: Thursday, September 7, 6 &#8211; 8:30 pm<br><br>Pre-opening concert&nbsp;with Shahzad Ismaily and Micha\u0142 Dymn&nbsp;<br>Tuesday, September 5, at 5pm (free, doors open at 4:30)&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Kus + Libera Press Release<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.thomaserben.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/PCI-NY_logo_allblack_onwhite-580x330.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"125\" height=\"71\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thomaserben.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/PCI-NY_logo_allblack_onwhite-580x330.jpg 580w, https:\/\/www.thomaserben.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/PCI-NY_logo_allblack_onwhite.jpg 791w\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-table\"><table><tbody><tr><td>Thomas Erben Gallery is very excited to present&nbsp;<strong>Kus + Libera<\/strong>, featuring the work of&nbsp;<strong>Agata Kus<\/strong>,&nbsp;in her US debut, and&nbsp;<strong>Zbigniew Libera<\/strong>. The show, opening Thursday, September 7, is supported&nbsp;by the Polish Cultural Institute New York and co-curated by its Curator of Visual Arts and&nbsp;Design, Izabela Gola.On view are recent photo works by critically lauded and prominently exhibited conceptualist&nbsp;<strong>Zbigniew Libera<\/strong>&nbsp;(b. 1959) as well as paintings by&nbsp;<strong>Agata Kus<\/strong>&nbsp;(b. 1987), who is part of the current&nbsp;surge of mainly young, female, figurative painters, and whose work has garnered widespread&nbsp;attention. Libera began exhibiting in the early 1980s behind the \u201ciron curtain\u201d in a Poland&nbsp;seeking to free itself from Soviet rule, whereas Kus\u2019s generation operates within and confronts&nbsp;a market-oriented, now capitalist society. The juxtaposition of their work shows how two artists&nbsp;\u2013 30 years apart in age and brought up under opposite political systems \u2013 respond to their&nbsp;contemporary situation.Realizing how and why each artist triggers and recontextualizes collective memories is key to&nbsp;understanding their work. Whereas Kus depicts her contemporary female protagonists in&nbsp;decayed interiors, recalling the neoclassical architecture of 19th century Poland and heightened&nbsp;patriotism in the face of its century-long partition by Russia, Prussia, and the Austrian Habsburg&nbsp;Monarchy \u2013 Libera often stages his photos from, what he calls, \u201cthe piles of images in our&nbsp;heads\u201d.His&nbsp;<em>Poetess Maria de Cyrano<\/em>&nbsp;(2020), for example, is reminiscent of the 1960s&nbsp;Civil Rights-era&nbsp;photograph of African American girl Ruby Bridges being escorted by police so that she can&nbsp;attend elementary school. While this connection draws us in, the work confounds on multiple&nbsp;levels. It presents a mob of elegantly, upwardly dressed men in drag, who \u2013 in a reversal of the&nbsp;conventional social order \u2013 assault and attack the central figure, a middle-aged woman,&nbsp;stoically marching and protectively clutching Julius Shulman\u2019s A Constructed View, which&nbsp;documents Los Angeles\u2019 mid-century architecture. Could the modest poetess be the reason for&nbsp;this aggression or perhaps the book, an ode to \u201cmodernity\u201d? And as the figure of a guard&nbsp;intrudes from the right of the picture, is he deliberately trying to keep us out? What are we not&nbsp;supposed to see?&nbsp;Unlike the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which together form a cohesive image, Libera lets a&nbsp;multitude of ideas collide without offering resolution.Likewise, though rendered in oil on canvas as well as engaging a long tradition of symbolism&nbsp;and mysticism, Kus juxtaposes images to equally open-ended, enigmatic ends. In&nbsp;<em>Come and See<\/em>&nbsp;(2023), a seductively painted young woman sits atop the skeleton of a horse, rendered after a&nbsp;prop used by Tadeusz Kantor in his experimental theatre piece,&nbsp;<em>Let the Artists Die<\/em>&nbsp;(1985). The&nbsp;morbidity of the scene is softened with cutesy details, such as hair clips in the horse\u2019s mane or a&nbsp;tail-wagging, little dog. Kus\u2019s theatrical tableaux evoke a grand past, yet her dilapidated&nbsp;interiors point toward collapse. This creates a stark contrast with her young women, who \u2013&nbsp;though presented as self-possessed and materially well off, considering their up-to-date&nbsp;fashions \u2013 are portrayed as unmoored, disengaged and mainly gazing at their iPhones.In both bodies of work, there is a dialogue between past and present. Whereas Libera sees a&nbsp;possibility for change in the continuation of a progressive social agenda \u2014 be it feminist,&nbsp;antimilitarist, or critical of institutional religion, Kus presents us with a contemporary condition&nbsp;in stasis. But her inclusion of religious symbols, removed as they might seem from official&nbsp;iconography \u2013 such as the likeness of St. Mary, her face bisected by the canvas edge or her&nbsp;tears of blood replaced by rhinestones \u2013 hint at the possibility of redemption amidst a crisis of&nbsp;meaning.<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Agata Kus, Zbigniew Libera Kus + Libera September 7 &#8211; October 21, 2023\u00a0 Opening reception: Thursday,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2227,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2228,"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2226\/revisions\/2228"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agatakus.pl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}