Visual Persuasion
Paulina Olowska

2 November 2023 – 3 March 2024

Opening hours during the Art Week
3 november, h. 10.00 – 19.00
4 november, h. 10.00 – 22.00.
From 19.00 to 22.00, on the occasion of the night of contemporary arts, entry will be free
5 november, h. 10.00 – 19.00

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Visual Persuasion, an original and ambitious project conceived by Paulina Olowska (Gdansk, 1976), and the artist’s largest exhibition to date at an Italian institution. Exploring the dynamics of desire and eroticism redefined from a female perspective, Visual Persuasion displays an anthology of Olowska’s existing and new productions alongside the artist’s curated selection of works from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection. Playing host to a stage of guests and ghosts throughout, Visual Persausion is envisioned as a multifaceted, polyphonic, and immersive space. 

The exhibition draws its inspiration from the 1961 text of the same name by advertising executive Stephen Baker. With reference to media theories and techniques, Baker combined image and text to analyse the effect of visual communication on the subconscious. Through what mechanisms do images exert their seductive power, how do they become vectors of desire? Fascinated by the languages of advertising, graphic design, and fashion, Olowska adopts the concept of persuasion as an artistic and curatorial principle to build the exhibition into a montage of works and images that induce associations and suggestions, emotions and fantasies. Within this imaginative universe, the female figure is both object and subject of the seductive action, embodying multiple roles and clichés across eras and cultures: bewitching icon, femme fatale, mischievous nymph, perverse dominatrix, demonic spirit, languid mannequin, uninhibited bourgeois, and confident sex worker. Above all, the woman is also an artist and maverick intellectual, as in the case of painter and illustrator Maja Berezowska (1898-1978), one of the muses of this project and author of images on the borderline between eroticism and pornography. 

Through Olowska’s works and those of the artists she invited, this phantasmagoria of desiring and desired women materializes in a plurality of forms and languages including painting, collage, ceramics, video, installation, and performance. Olowska projects this spectacle through the context of the sleepless midnight city, a web of streets illuminated by the signs of clubs, bars, and cinemas, relentlessly feeding the machine of consumerist and erotic desire. Transforming the space of the museum to offer an immersive and cinematic experience, Olowska’s exhibition architecture is dominated by her new site-specific installation of neons, a significant feature of the artist’s practice. An emblem of advertising communication in the urban space, neon has strong ties to both the applied arts and art history. Olowska’s particular interest arose from the neon signs decorating the city of Warsaw under socialist regime. Often lacking a specific commercial purpose, these neons became symbols of consumerism in the absence of a referent: pure signs of desire in its connection to urban experience. 

During the opening of the exhibition on Nov. 2, Olowska will present a new performance featuring singer Pat Dudek revisiting and developing on the Naughty Nymphs project first premiered in 2022 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Visually inspired by the soft porn style of VIVA, an adult magazine for women published through the 1970s in the United States, the performance piece will be expanded through installation interventions that populate the Foundation’s restaurant, cafeteria, and bookshop area. Here a series of paintings on fabric, in dialogue with a video installation, converge the hazy aesthetics of porno chic with American modernist abstraction and neoclassical sculpture in a proliferation of historical, political, and cultural references that produce new meaning. In Olowska’s work, the past is a living place continually generating images, promoting encounters, creating alliances, and projecting ideas and dreams forward. 

Paulina Olowska was born in 1976 in Gdansk, Poland, and lives and works in Rabka Zdroj and Krakow, Poland. She has had one-person exhibitions at Kistefos Museum, Oslo; Kunsthalle Basel; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Olowska received the prestigious Aachen Art Prize in 2014, with an associated exhibition at the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Germany. She has also staged performances at Art Institute Chicago; Tate Modern, London; the Carnegie International; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kitchen, New York; Museo del Novecento, Milan. Her work was featured in the 2017 National Gallery of Victoria Triennial in Melbourne and the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, as well as in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; mumok, Vienna; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Migros Museum Für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; and the New Museum, New York. 

Visual Persuasion 
An exhibition by Paulina Olowska 

With selected works from Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection by   
Tauba Auberbach, Vanessa Beecroft, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Trisha Donnelly, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Nan Goldin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschhorn, Piotr Janas, Elena Kovylina, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Moffatt, Catherine Opie, Diego Perrone, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Simon Starling and Richard Wentworth. 

And additional works and contributions by 
Maya Berezowska, Walerian Borowczyk, Pat Dudek, Irini Karayannopoulou, Sylvère Lotringer and Julie Verhoeven 

Curatorial coordination 
Irene Calderoni 

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, via Modane, 16