Paulina Gołygowska

Narcissism (2008)

Program: Vernissage Pavilion B Friday (19.03) 09:00 p.m.

Paulina Gołygowska – born in 1986 in Szczecin. A graduate from the Art Highschool in Szczecin with a photography profile and the Visual Advertisement at the Artistic School TOP-ART. She received a scholarship from the President of Szczecin in 2005.

She has her paintings and drawings presented on individual as well as collective exhibitions. In September 2009 her first photography exhibition took place, in the FOTOART gallery, where the diploma of TOP-ART school was shown. A topic of her work were the illustrations to Haruki Murakami novel entitled A Wild Sheep Chase.

She is an artist of a new generation. She reveals herself as a rebel and an inciter, whose artistic work is focused on the emotional criticism of the consumerist reality. Universal, nearly direct in her statement, she avoids over-intellectualised forms of contact with a viewer, joining the pieces of the reality with the use of simple association rules. She communicates with the use of photographic techniques (collages, photo-installations, photo-plastic). Due to her passion for classic plastic forms she juxtaposes the elements of drawing, paining and sculpture with a modern digital technique of picture processing.

A photographic project Narcissism is an attempt to contemplate on the problem of the contemporary ideal of beauty created by the mass media. In my project I wonder about the condition of a woman and her need for acceptance in the world, where models on the catwalks, actresses and billboards shout I want to be thin, I will do anything to be beautiful. Femininity is a product of culture made through socialisation. A body becomes a bargaining good. The images of women shown in press are the reflection of omnipresent stereotypes. A woman shown in a magazine is obliged to take care of her sex appeal and in those attempts she becomes a greedy narcissistic consumer. Have we overstepped the borders of body cult? How much does the development of civilisation influence our mood when in contemporary times our only goddesses are almighty Anorexia and Bulimia?

A project consists of ten spatial installations documented on photos.

I used female newspapers' cuttings for my work – face photos and slogans in order to build a certain image for the receiver. By selective picking out the elements I built a world where a woman – consumer lives. A world where what really counts is what is important according to colorful magazines: 100% of a woman. Therefore, we can assume that there are periodicals which know best how to take care of her. They present an idealised image of a woman – a mother, a wife, a lover. They create an illusion of happiness.

It is hard to resist the impression that we deal with a rebel against dehumanisation of the consumerist culture and not only with the story about selective psychological phenomenon while we associate with an installation called Narcissism. The power of those pictures lays in the uncertainty of a problem. They are not an attempt to analize the narcissism phenomenon, but a direct speech aimed at a viewer based on the fairy-tale semantic frame. The ABC of a cut-out, which elements are arranged on the basis of simple associations like e.g. equality sign between a man's dignity in a form of a face photo and a bag of slimming drink. They make a viewer immediately responding to the matter, as a kind of shock therapy. It is an emotional play of the artist with a participant of the consumerist culture regardless of the level of his social consciousness. The form of art that is disclosed is a kind of emotional speech, lacking empty intellectualisation, a declaration of emotions established by the author's disagrement with the dehumanised reality. It is an honest approach, revealed in the history of art in many different ways, appropriate to the contemporary social structures – from Hieronim Bosch to Hans Arp. There are two ends – on the one a conscious responsibility of the author as a participant of the social life, but on the other, a romantic rebel of youth. Narcissism as a concept borrowed from psychology is the provocation of the author, who is focused on the idea of individual's freedom. She lives with the feeling of necessity to defend the value of humanistic invariants regardless of their cultural fixation through ratio or in religious structures.

The beauty is inside You, all You have to do is educe it, says the advertisement slogan of a brand of cosmetic product – we are looking forward for the author's response, the author who is sensitive to the man's value, regardless of the prevailing fashion…

Noil Branc