{"id":3872,"date":"2023-09-01T10:52:25","date_gmt":"2023-09-01T10:52:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.galeriafoksal.pl\/?p=3872"},"modified":"2025-05-30T14:53:32","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T14:53:32","slug":"nelly-agassi-ogrod-przyjemnosci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.galeriafoksal.pl\/en\/nelly-agassi-ogrod-przyjemnosci\/","title":{"rendered":"Nelly Agassi, Pleasure Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opening: 1 September (Fri.), 6:00 pm<\/p>\n

1.09\u201314.10.2023<\/p>\n

curator \/ text: Aleksandra K\u0119dziorek<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Soft Tangle sculpture was made in collaboration with Jonah Evron Agassi, the artist\u2019s son<\/p>\n

English translation by Caryl Swift\npost-production of collages Karol Bagi\u0144ski<\/p>\n

sound \/ composition \/ electronic resonators Ryan Packard<\/p>\n

harpsichord Andrew Rosenblum<\/p>\n

field recording by Boryslaw Kozielski, Br\u00f3dnowski forest, Warsaw, Poland; recorded inside Warsaw forest with a Zoom H-5<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This site-specific installation by Nelly Agassi is inspired by the origins of the word \u2018Foksal\u2019, the street from which the gallery takes its name. In it, the artist investigates the biography of the place, Foksal, a story which ranges from the eighteenth-century Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London after which it was named to the Foksal Gallery and the history of the artistic avant-garde bound up with it.<\/p>\n

Agassi reaches back to the year 1776 and the suburban area of Warsaw where a banker and a royal valet, Fryderyk Kabryt and Franciszek Ryx, respectively, founded Foksal, a spot designed for the entertainment of the loftier spheres of society and modelled on Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. She listens intently to the echoes of the fun to be had there, the concerts, nocturnal illuminations and firework displays, the first balloon flights and the balls organised there by \u2018robber prince\u2019 Jerzy Marcin Lubomirski, a scandalous figure in the midst of high society in Warsaw at the time.<\/p>\n

She also looks in on the Elizeum, an underground rotunda \u201cfor Friends and beauteous women\u201d in the sentimental Prince Kazimierz Poniatowski\u2019s nearby gardens, now Park Na Ksi\u0105\u017c\u0119cem. Designed to host social gatherings and revelries, its lavishly furnished interiors sent guests into transports of delight. William Coxe, a British traveller, would recall not only the columns of artificial marble, comfortable sofas and \u201cpaintings in fresco\u201d, but also the way that:\n[w]hile we were admiring the beauty of the rotunda, our ears were suddenly regaled with a concert of exquisite music from an invisible band, and a magnificent table was spread with such expedition as to resemble the effects of enchantment\u201d .<\/p>\n

Finally, Agassi turns to 1966. That was the year when, in the former library of the Visual Arts Studio in an outbuilding of the Zamoyski Palace, the Foksal Gallery opened. In Wprowadzenie do og\u00f3lnej Teorii Miejsca (An Introduction to the General Theory of Place), its founders defended the autonomy of art in the face of the reality around them. The place they describe as exhibition, gallery and space for creating and experiencing art:\nis an abrupt breach in the utilitarian understanding of the world. The place emerges from the suspension of all the laws in force in the world .\nAlternatives to the realities of the communist People\u2019s Republic of Poland were manifest in the exhibitions, vernissages, accompanying events and the famous Farewell to Spring Ball in Zalesie, a suburb of Warsaw. The set created in the gardens there by Edward Krasi\u0144ski alluded to that place of idleness and bliss which was Pieter Bruegel the Elder\u2019s The Land of Cockaigne and allowed the partygoers to switch off from the hard realities of 1968 for as long as the fun lasted.<\/p>\n

Agassi is not an archivist. She carves into the biography of a place as if it were material, extracting the threads that interest her and inverting meanings. Facts intertwine with fiction, history and fantasy in her works. She reads a place intuitively, filtering it through herself and constructing a personal connection with its past, present and future.<\/p>\n

She fills the space of the gallery with scaled-up collages, sometimes featuring grotesque fusions of female figures, animals\u2019 bodies, plants and furniture. The garden built from them is pleasant, yet, at the same time, bizarre and unsettling. This is nature subjugated, nature which could slip out of control at any moment and reveal its dark side. The form of some of the collages is akin to follies, those structures encountered in eighteenth-century gardens, like Elizeum or the now vanished artificial grotto, minaret, Chinese pavilion and imam\u2019s home in the Na Ksi\u0105\u017c\u0119cem gardens. Madness is contained within their name.<\/p>\n

The collages Agassi has been using for several years now in her work on \u2018the biography of place\u2019 spring from archival illustrations. Modest in size at the beginning and monumentalised in her most recent exhibitions, they enable her to create an alternative reality, to weave female figures into a male-dominated world, to play with the myths growing around a place, to overturn order and to extract that which, as she herself says, is usually swept under the carpet.<\/p>\n

One thing of the essence to her work on Pleasure Garden were the photographs of Krasi\u0144ski\u2019s 1985 exhibition which she found in the Foksal\u2019s archives. For that almost forgotten show, the gallery was filled with trees created from birch branches and its walls were covered with photo wallpaper depicting a forest. Krasi\u0144ski cut a horizontal strip out of the artificial nature which had been introduced into the interior of the gallery, reversing the action he carried out in works where he applied ScotchBlue\u2122 tape to objects in non-gallery spaces. By cutting out that strip of the photo wallpaper and shattering the illusion, he made the border between art and reality visible.\nAgassi does nothing as straightforward as repeating his gesture. She welcomes the public to Pleasure Garden and bids them farewell with a neon form which, like Medusa\u2019s head or an apotropaic sculpture, underscores the border between two worlds. With its interwoven structure, it also alludes to the complexity of contemporary interpretations of the gallery\u2019s avant-garde legacy.<\/p>\n

Phot. Bartosz G\u00f3rka<\/p>\n