Paulina Ołowska’s intermedial practice is inherently holistic, unfolding at the intersection of image production, performance, and exhibition-making. One of the most widely recognized figures of contemporary European art, Ołowska (b. 1976) has produced numerous iconic works, including the performance Alphabet (2005), at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the reconstructed neon sign Siatkarka [Volleyball Player] (2006), on Warsaw’s Constitution Square; the installation Zofia Stryjeńska for the 5th Berlin Biennale; and The Mother: An Unsavoury Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue, presented at Tate Modern, London, in 2015. Her expansive practice encompasses painting, collage, photography, ceramics, film, and exhibition design, as well as curatorial and publishing projects.
Ołowska’s practice can be understood as a reorganization of regimes of visibility: images, gestures, and historical forms are subjected to processes of montage, appropriation, and aesthetic translation. Rather than simply representing reality, her works stage the conditions under which it becomes visible, drawing attention to the historically contingent and mediated nature of perception. In the terms of Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible”, Ołowska reconfigures established visual idioms, exposing their ideological tensions while recovering their unrealized emancipatory potential.
Ołowska’s longstanding collaboration with renowned New York gallery Metro Pictures — associated with Cindy Sherman and the practices of the Pictures Generation — also provides a context central to her approach. She thereby positions her Eastern European perspective in relation to Western postmodernism and the critique of representation. Through the appropriation and aesthetic displacement of motifs, she reinterprets both the emancipatory narratives of Eastern European modernism and constructions of female subjectivity, drawing on ostensibly functional forms such as design, graphic art, fashion, decoration, and the aesthetics of propaganda from late socialism.
In THREE COLOURS, Ołowska draws on Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film trilogy Trois Couleurs (1993–4) and its affective resonance with her own visual imaginary. The exhibition develops a hybrid mode of visual narration centred on the performative construction of female identity and on lifestyle as a symbolic order that is historically and culturally produced yet remains inherently fluid.
Throughout the exhibition, paintings and moving images are accorded equal status, forming a carefully orchestrated ensemble that activates the gallery’s three floors and staircase. Together, they create a distinctive form of “Over-Expanded Cinema”. The cinematic medium is extended beyond its conventional boundaries: painting and film no longer operate solely as autonomous forms but enter into a relationship akin to montage, their spatial proximity generating new tensions, associations, and meanings.
Formal references to Kieślowski’s trilogy — colour, gesture, the interplay of light and shadow, sound, and the symbolic potential of objects — are transferred from the realm of cinematic narrative into the exhibition space. Movement is therefore no longer solely a property of film but emerges through relationships between the paintings on canvas and “celluloid”, sound, and the audience's movement. The gallery becomes an expanded field of montage in which spectators, moving between objects, reconstruct a cinematic sequence through their own body and gaze.
Similarly, the affective states present in Kieślowski’s films — suffering, alienation, the oppression of patriarchal norms, and the aspirations and fantasies of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité — are transformed by Ołowska into the exhibition’s structure and the language of painterly matter. Rather than merely being represented, affect structures the encounter between image, space, and the viewer’s body.
Their visual equivalents are the three colours of the French flag—blue, white, and red. These fulfil a dual function: organising the formal structure of the images while becoming vehicles for the political, gendered, and emotional memory of Kieślowski’s trilogy. In this sense, Ołowska’s “Over-Expanded Cinema” doesn’t reconstruct the director’s films but translates them spatially and affectively. She weaves motifs from Kieślowski’s trilogy into her own narratives and memories. In Ecstasy, a young woman’s encounter with the painting of the same name in a Kraków museum sparks an emotional identification with the figure of a Russian empress; elsewhere, characters confront decisions that will shape the course of their lives.
As in her earlier work, the paintings, films, and collages in the exhibition depart from a mimetic model of representation in favour of restaging the mechanisms by which images are produced. Ołowska is not only concerned with what an image depicts but also with how it is constructed, mediated, and interpreted. This question takes on particular significance in relation to film, which, having inherited from painting the function of a “window onto the world”, produces an illusion of direct access to reality. Whereas the material and subjective construction of a painting is generally more discernible, the cinematic image encourages viewers to align their gaze with that of the camera and, consequently, to perceive what it depicts as more objective and credible.
It is precisely this apparent neutrality of the cinematic gaze that becomes one of the subjects of Ołowska’s critical reflection. The artist draws attention not only to what an image depicts but also to who is looking and from what position. Her strategy evokes the tradition of avant-garde cinema, which made the materiality of the medium an object of artistic and epistemological reflection rather than concealing it. Ołowska thus reveals the constructed nature of cinematic vision while simultaneously employing its culturally established credibility as a means of persuasion and of directing the viewer’s gaze.
In this context, the audience’s gaze not only becomes a site of reception but also a field for the artist’s intervention. By organising the act of looking, Ołowska enables viewers to identify with the narratives and experiences represented, simultaneously revealing the construction of the cinematic image through devices such as the momentary removal of sound from her films, looped shots, and the repetition of selected motifs. The appearance of direct access to reality is thus confronted with an awareness that every gaze is already the product of a particular organisation of the image.
Ołowska does not, however, prescribe a single interpretation. Instead, she directs the viewer’s attention toward the subjects and experiences she seeks to render visible. In doing so, she appropriates the culturally entrenched belief in the camera’s objectivity and mobilizes it as a persuasive device. Whereas Kieślowski emphasized the subjectivity of his narratives in pursuit of ambiguity and poetic resonance, Ołowska engages a contrary capacity of film: its ability to produce a sense of immediacy, authenticity, and representational truth. As a result, the tension between visibility and the construction of vision becomes one of the focal mechanisms of her practice.
Paulina Ołowska’s THREE COLOURS consequently unfolds less as a linear narrative than as a space in which the gaze is organized and meaning is produced. Painting, scenography, costume, collage, and film form an interwoven network of visual and affective relationships. Through montage and aesthetic translation, Ołowska reconfigures historical visual idioms, turning their cultural authority into a means of structuring perception. At the same time, she reveals the autopoetic and autofictional dimensions of her own involvement in processes through which collective memory is produced and transformed.
Text by Goschka Gawlik