Once I arrive at Artist Home Kadenówka, the gate stares me down with large cast-iron eyes. Behind it looms a wood home lifted straight from a fairytale. Each enchanting and creepy, it’s neighboured incongruously by boxy midcentury house blocks within the Polish spa city of Rabka-Zdrój, an hour’s drive south of Kraków.
“I didn’t select this home; it form of got here to me,” says artist Paulina Olowska of the constructing she purchased in 2009. “Rabka has all these wonderful deserted buildings – and I discovered this one.” She swiftly inaugurated the home with a group mission known as the Mycorial Theatre. “The roof was fully open. The home was fully haunted. Lightbulbs have been smashing. Individuals have been screaming. And I had,” she laughs mischievously, “numerous mushrooms.”
This uncommon instance of conventional regional structure has since turn out to be half heritage-preservation enterprise (Olowska labored with a neighborhood craftsman, Tadeusz Harkabuz, on the renovations, and the constructing has protected standing), half artist residency and half mission house. It’s a spot that each offers inspiration for Olowska’s artwork and is an artwork set up itself. “Spending time at Kadenówka is like taking a transparent stroll in Paulina’s mind,” says Karine Haimo, vp at Tempo gallery in London, which co-represents the artist.
Born in Gdańsk, Olowska is finest identified for her figurative work that circle round themes of style and femininity, typically nodding to the socialist historical past of jap Europe. But the 48-year-old’s work spans movie, images, sculpture and efficiency. She has introduced theatrical work at Tate Trendy, revealed {a magazine} about artwork and theatre known as Pavilionesque, and was the visitor editor of the 2018 artwork difficulty of Polish Vogue. Her subsequent solo exhibition, opening later this month at Tempo Geneva, includes a collection of eerie work impressed by the dream-like images of Deborah Turbeville. Olowska was drawn to the style editor-turned-photographer’s experimental pictures on a quantity of ranges: “We share a sure melancholia for style, [a feeling] that style has a symbolic dimension related to womanhood, and an understanding of how spirituality and symbols will be integrated into totally different mediums.”
Olowska moved from Berlin to Rabka-Zdrój 16 years in the past. Why? “Effectively, for love, in fact,” she replies rapidly, explaining that her husband’s mother and father lived in the city. “Escapism was additionally part of it,” she says. “It was a creative alternative.”
A significant inspiration was the long-sidelined Polish painter, illustrator and set designer Zofia Stryjeńska. “She began to work with design and tapestry, and was connecting to fairytales and folklore, and all in a cartoonish type that was nearer to Walt Disney than any Polish work. She form of directed me in the direction of the countryside as a result of she was all the time writing about how nature had an enormous affect on her and her goals and visions. I assumed, ‘Possibly that is what I’m lacking in this Berlin nightclub scene?’ , speaking nonsense concerning the artwork world at 2am.”
She and her husband moved right into a typical rural home, the place she constructed an atelier within the backyard. Within the Polish countryside, she found a broader lifestyle centred round mythology, craft and magic. “I grew to become a Slavic goddess,” she laughs, dressed at the moment in a conventional people‑type costume, the off-white cloth embroidered with pink figures and floral motifs, impressed by conventional Polish paper cut-outs. Accompanied by her white-furred, baby-bear-sized Polish Tatra sheepdog, Bronka, she makes lunch of borscht, pierogi and various mushrooms – oyster, lion’s mane and shiitake, equipped by her “mushroom seller” in Kraków. The set-up strikes a performative tone.
“It’s a theatre,” says Olowska, gesturing round the primary central house of Kadenówka, ignored on all sides by a first-floor balcony. “I feel it was used for internet hosting soirées, masquerade balls and summer season and New Yr’s Eve events.” The home was designed in 1932 by Adam Kaden, a author, painter and designer whose father, a health care provider, owned the city’s medical centre. “They have been affluent bourgeoisie, and Adam was the bon vivant of the household,” says Olowska. The home is an anomaly in its mixture of architectural influences: modernist, Zakopane type (the humanities and crafts-adjacent aesthetic motion pioneered by Stanisław Witkiewicz and named after a close-by city) and Hutsulian. “The Hutsulian take is from the Ukrainian highlanders,” says Olowska, highlighting its affect on particulars such because the carved wood door handles and the small sun- and moon-shaped home windows within the loft. “People is one of many themes of this home.”
Olowska is constructing on this theme along with her personal collections. Ceramics by Polish producers Koło, Włoclawek and Łysa Góra line the partitions of the kitchen; there are Zakopane type rugs on the flooring; and patchworked bedspreads from the Cepelia, a state-run cooperative based in 1949 that shut up store 4 years in the past. “Within the Sixties every little thing was inventive, even the rubbish cans.” She exhibits me a concrete garbage bin formed like a bear outdoors the entrance door: “It’s from socialist occasions.”
Olowska’s imaginative and prescient isn’t solely about nostalgia, although. She’s thinking about how these inventive and romantic notions will be related for a brand new technology. She does this by inviting worldwide artists to Kadenówka, such because the American Marnie Weber and Devon‑based mostly Alexis Soul-Grey, who stayed there for 10 days along with her household. “I suppose Paulina seems for uncommon expertise to assist,” says Soul-Grey. “She has a motherly intent to assist different artists.”
She’s additionally a champion of Polish expertise. The gate is a fee by modern Kraków-based artist Małgorzata Markiewicz, combining archaic and conventional symbols – “the Roma wheel, the home of magic and a Zakopane parzenica”. Round the home there are stained-glass home windows and lights by younger Kraków-based Marcin Janusz; a sculpture by Warsaw artist Agata Słowak; one in every of Romani artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s textile collages; and several other darkish and brooding work by surrealist artist Luka Woźniczko. “You will know the entire Polish artwork scene with all these names,” she says fortunately. “Sooner or later, this can be a museum for modern artwork and folklore.” She has additional plans to open a museum of puppetry in Rabka, within the previous puppet theatre constructing she coated with murals 10 years in the past. “However that’s one other story…”
Rabka-Zdrój, with its climbing trails among the many picturesque Gorce mountains, has lengthy been a vacation spot. Within the Twenties it bloomed as a spa vacation spot, benefiting from the mineral-rich waters of the Raba river, and was additionally used a spot of rehabilitation for sick kids. “It’s very attention-grabbing as a result of it has these big previous sanatoriums,” says Olowska. “They’re empty, they usually’re haunted.”
The city is the topic of a latest e-book, The City of Kids of the World by Polish author Beata Chomątowska, who spent her summers in Rabka as a toddler. “The city has a really pastel, official, utopian picture, however I sensed one thing beneath,” Chomątowska says. “It’s a really Freudian place, a mysterious place that has been someway misplaced in time. My colleague described it because the Polish Twin Peaks. I found the shadow facet of Rabka. I spoke to individuals who have been ‘cured’ right here as youngsters and their reminiscences are stuffed with horror.”
The darkness of Rabka is current in Olowska’s work too. It’s there within the winter landscapes and black-clad girls of her new work, and within the life-size, puppet-like sculptures, proven at Tempo London final yr and now residents of Kadenówka, that are impressed partially by the Polish Marzanna dolls that symbolise Morana, the Slavic goddess of winter, plague and loss of life. It’s a Slavic custom to burn after which drown the straw-braided doll on the primary day of spring to mark the top of winter – a ritual that Olowska carried out in 2021 when she co-curated the present Mora Zmora: Femme mythological figures in Slavic folklore at Organistówka (one other of Rabka’s wood buildings, now changed into vacation residences, subsequent to the towering Seventeenth-century church of Saint Mary Magdalene that at the moment homes a people museum).
Her second artists’ gathering at Kadenówka was devoted to mycology and magic, in a bid to “clear the home”, spiritually, by means of rituals and healings. “Coping with witchcraft influenced my work so much, however then – and I don’t know if it was related or not – I really had an actual meltdown,” she remembers. “I began to query every little thing.” And he or she hid away her magic books.
Not that she’s stopped with magic solely. When she texts me later, she indicators off with the witch emoji. And when she curated the Tempo sales space at Artwork Basel Paris final month, she known as it Mystic Sugar: a present of her work and others’ billed as “a up to date reappraisal of the witch as a robust image of liberation and otherworldly notion”.
“My precedence with my work is to take issues which are out of the mainstream and attempt to query them,” she concludes. “And now people is in style. Individuals are drawn to it as a result of it’s unregulated, it’s not hierarchical – it’s wild.”
As as to whether the home remains to be haunted – “What do you suppose?” Olowska shrugs. She then smiles her elfin smile. “Would you sleep right here in a single day?”
Paulina Olowska and Deborah Turbeville: Widows of the Wind is at Tempo Geneva from 21 November to 7 February 2025
