Anna Ciba at Fundacja Arton

The just about-emptiness of this exhibition eerily befits an artist who disappeared without the need of a trace in 2018, virtually three many years right after she stopped building artwork amid struggles with schizophrenia identified in the mid-1980s. Titled “When you appear into my eyes, you see what?,” the display contains documentation of Ciba’s short output as a scholar at the Academy of Great Arts in Warsaw from 1982 to 1987, as properly as a handful of photographs of her at the time and two images taken not extended just before she went lacking. Most intriguing is a collection of exhibition photographs displayed within a vitrine: bold, glyphlike marks in black-and-white acrylic on massive sheets hung free in room-sized installations. One photograph depicts a sparse composition of angular traces that variously resemble an arrow, a test mark, and a triangular peak against a crimson background that curator Zuzanna Wilska suspects was stitched together from the crimson bottom band of various Polish flags.

Wilska argues for Ciba’s job as a crucial figure in Polish art in the 1980s, pointing to her participation in key group reveals in Warsaw that encapsulated an emphatic switch to painting all over that ten years. Although many peers channeled collective exhaustion with each the language of the avant-garde and a restrictive socialist regime into expressive, often absurd figuration akin to the Neue Wilde, Ciba worked in escalating isolation and cultivated a somewhat distinctive pared-down and abstracted symbology. As hardly any of Ciba’s operate exists today (a pair of doodles gifted to a pal and exhibited right here bear minor resemblance to her painting), the just about vacant exhibition asserts Ciba’s existence by producing her absence material. The do the job of preserving archives, to which the Arton Foundation is committed, from time to time has significantly less to do with filling in gaps than insisting on the holes that unsettle canonized variations of artwork history.

— Camila McHugh