What might make a flower evil? In the case of Piotr Uklański’s most recent still life paintings, it is the burden of history. Borrowing the evocative title of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry volume Fleurs du Mal, Uklański seeks to imbue his works with the conflict generated by opposing terms — confronting emblems of nature’s manifestation of intrinsic beauty with man-made depravity and societal moral decay. Uklański’s flowers — their source images drawn from the Catalogue of Wartime Losses, the official database of works of art, including paintings, plundered by the Nazis during WWII — are haunted by their association with the cultural expropriations of war.
For his second solo show at the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Uklański has created over a dozen paintings based on works irrevocably lost or presumed destroyed. Painted in a deliberately eclectic range of styles that conjure up various periods in the history of art, with their ever-shifting tides of esthetic taste of the collecting classes, these floral and fruit still lifes offer an eerie retrospective of the European nature morte genre from the Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age to early twentieth century movements such as the Nabis and Surrealism. Their cacophonous variety is redolent of the Nazis’ indiscriminate appetite for impounding or destroying the wealth of their victims.
“I fully admit that I had a passion for collecting things. And if they were to be confiscated, I wanted my small part,” admitted Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring at his Nuremberg Tribunal trial. Göring and his henchmen ran Hitler’s E.R.R. — der Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die Besetzten Gebiete (the Reich Leader Rosenberg Task Force for the Occupied Territories) — deemed the “most efficient art-looting enterprise of all time” — a Nazi task force of administrators, art experts, conservators, appraisers, and cataloguers, whose mission was to hoard as many cultural treasures, both great and small, of their victims as possible. Each malevolent act of looting violated these objects, intended as conduits of beauty and status — but now tainted with the evil of plunder. Nazi lust was not limited to Old Masters and prominent trophies; when the homes of Jews, Poles, and others perceived as enemies of the Reich were liquidated, even the most petit-bourgeois trinkets were amassed and catalogued in the E.R.R. inventory. For the Nazis, looting was yet another tool of terror. Baudelaire’s introduction to Les Fleurs du Mal in which the poet notes humanity’s potential for evil, unnervingly brings to mind the Nazi strategy of wholesale plunder and annihilation:
If rape and arson, poison and the knife
Have not yet stitched their ludicrous designs
Onto the banal buckram of our fates,
It is because our souls lack enterprise!
The parallel between the eponymous “banality of evil”, diagnosed by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of Eichmann as a cog in Hitler’s killing machine, and the banality of taste that motivated the Nazi campaign of systemic looting is compelling. Just as Eichmann’s evil actions were rooted in the seemingly ordinary motives of just “doing his job” efficiently and well, so too is the covetous act of stealing, along with the jewelry and silverware, the most banal forms of bourgeois art — the still lifes hanging in every upper middle-class home.
The classical form of the sonnet, often used by Baudelaire, contradicts its brutal content. It’s like a box of wormy chocolates, attractive only on the outside. Uklański’s concept is similar: here we have nicely painted pictures with the populist motif of flowers — a painterly sonnet telling the story of a “ludicrous design” of “rape, and arson, poison and the knife” inflicted on the “banal” canvas of life.
Uklański considers his Fleurs du Mal paintings “restitutions”, or “restorations.” He aims to “restore” the looted artifacts as specters evoking the cruel intent of the cultural plunder, just as humans have for centuries irrationally attempted to resurrect their dead with occult practices such as séances and voodoo rituals. Yet he also appears to take a perverse pleasure in reintroducing these banal genre paintings into the contemporary art scene, infecting it with the loaded history of this seemingly clichéd art form. With many, the photographic records or descriptions left behind by the Nazis have been scant or nonexistent . Uklański has strived to resuscitate their beauty from oblivion — through utopic vivification.
His revisitation was inspired by the 2022, multivolume publication Report on the Losses Sustained by Poland as a Result of German Aggression and Occupation during the Second World War, 1939–1945, and the debate it triggered about the spoils of war reflecting a shared societal trauma omnipresent in the national psyche. These losses and the call for the vindication of these claims continues to play a major part in Polish national politics in which both right and center parties instrumentalize this collective fantasy of reparation and retribution for their own political gains.
Uklański was working on this project when Gerhard Richter opened his exhibition pavilion “Birkenau” in Auschwitz. Uklański describes it as: “the ultimate self-important, imperialist gesture in the guise of a ‘memorial.’ Does Poland need Richter’s abstract paintings in a mortuary-like chapel? When in fact we just would rather have our stolen Raphael back”. He continues: “For me, this issue of restitution is a utopia bordering on phantasmagoria. Restitution is emotional rather than physical. It’s not just about Nazis or Stalinists; Napoleon and all the other imperialists deployed the same forms of seizure as cultural rape. I wanted to convey a dose of universalism in attempting to revisit lost paintings, of which no images remain — but only fragmentary descriptions. Restitution is a state of mind.”
Piotr Uklański – born in 1968 in Warsaw, lives and works in New York and Warsaw.
Uklański has developed a diverse body of work that employs photography, film, installation and performance. His works have been presented in numerous exhibitions:, the most recent including – solo: Il Tormento di Chopin, Bibliothèque Polonaise de Paris, Paris (2022-23), Suicide Stunners’ Séance, Belmont Chapel - Island Cemetery, Newport (2020), Ottomania, Luxembourg & Dayan, New York (2019), Poland, National Museum in Krakow, Krakow (2018), Fatal Attraction: Piotr Uklański Photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2015), Forty and Four, Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, Warsaw (2012), Piotr Uklański: A Retrospective, Secession, Vienna (2007) and group: American Vignettes: Symbols, Society, and Satire, Rubell Museum, Washington (2024); Tears of Joy, Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw (2024); 16th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2019); documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017), 2010 Whitney Biennal, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate Modern, London (2009), When Things Cast no Shadow, 5th Berlin Biennale (2008).
Piotr Uklański, Les Fleurs du Mal, 2024, Foksal Gallery Foundation, installation views, photo Marek Gardulski