Katarzyna Kozyra. Master of Puppets
Schmela Haus – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
26 October 2012 – 10 March 2013

Master of Puppets is the name of Katarzyna Kozyra's latest project basically representing a summary of her œuvre so far. Born in the 1960s in Warsaw and grown up in Austria and Germany, Kozyra today is one of Poland's most popular and most critically acclaimed female artists. She studied under Prof. Grzegorz Kowalski and graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts' faculty of sculpture in 1993. In fact, it was her graduation project Pyramid of Animals which lead to a nationwide discussion on the role of art within the social dialogue and finally became a key work to a development now known as Critical Art. Together with other early works Pyramid of Animals is representative for Kozyra's intense engangement with her very personal life and experiences, forcing the viewer to become emotionally and personally involved.

In her video installation Men's Bathhouse presented at the Venice Biennale in 1999, Kozyra dressed like man to explore the authoritarian dominion of a male bathhouse in Budapest and received a honorable mention for her work. For her longterm project In Art Dreams Come True started in 2003, she acts as both director and actor and by this not only explores the very ideas of femininity but also questiones common means of art. Throughout almost all of her works, she combines elements of visual arts, theatre, performance, dance and choreography.

A major exhibition shown at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 2010 in fact marked the beginning of Kozyra's probably most extensive project. For over two years now Kozyra held castings in Warsaw and Tel Aviv, looking for actors who will finally appear in a movie about her life. The next casting will be taking place in in New York in June 2012. The Midget Gallery is another longterm project which Kozyra started in 2006 and which will be featured in the exhibition in Düsseldof as well.

Especially created for the spaces of Schmela Haus in Düsseldorf and as the title already implies, the concept of Master of Puppets refers to a critical dealing with proportions, scales and sizes. The basic idea is to allow for a new reception of Kozyra's already existing works by either reducing or enlarging their respective sizes.  Also the artist will work with viewing habits and reception in general integrating the given architectural characteristics into her curatorial concept. Still the introduced ideas about the exhibition in Düsseldorf must be regarded with reservation and can only serve to convey a first impression of the project.

For more information about either the artist and the works mentioned within the text,  or the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, please visit: www.katarzynakozyra.pl


The exhibition organised by Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw in the Schmela Haus of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is part of the cultural exchange programme “Klopsztanga. Poland without borders in North Rhine-Westphalia” with the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Warsaw.