Anna Ciba at Fundacja Arton

The just about-emptiness of this exhibition eerily befits an artist who disappeared with no hint in 2018, almost three a long time after she stopped making artwork amid struggles with schizophrenia identified within the mid-Nineteen Eighties. Titled “Once you look into my eyes, you see what?,” the present consists of documentation of Ciba’s temporary output as a scholar on the Academy of Effective Arts in Warsaw from 1982 to 1987, in addition to a handful of pictures of her on the time and two footage taken not lengthy earlier than she went lacking. Most intriguing is a choice of exhibition photographs displayed inside a vitrine: daring, glyphlike marks in black-and-white acrylic on massive sheets hung free in room-sized installations. One {photograph} depicts a sparse composition of angular strains that variously resemble an arrow, a verify mark, and a triangular peak towards a crimson background that curator Zuzanna Wilska suspects was stitched collectively from the purple backside band of quite a few Polish flags.

Wilska argues for Ciba’s position as a key determine in Polish artwork within the Nineteen Eighties, pointing to her participation in main group exhibits in Warsaw that encapsulated an emphatic flip to portray all through that decade. Whereas many friends channeled collective exhaustion with each the language of the avant-garde and a restrictive socialist regime into expressive, usually absurd figuration akin to the Neue Wilde, Ciba labored in rising isolation and cultivated a comparatively distinctive pared-down and abstracted symbology. As hardly any of Ciba’s work exists at this time (a pair of doodles gifted to a buddy and exhibited right here bear little resemblance to her portray), the almost vacant exhibition asserts Ciba’s presence by making her absence materials. The work of preserving archives, to which the Arton Basis is devoted, generally has much less to do with filling in gaps than insisting on the holes that unsettle canonized variations of artwork historical past.

— Camila McHugh