Paulina Olowska. Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas

About

Marking Paulina Olowska’s debut exhibition with Pace since joining the gallery’s programme in 2022, the artist will showcase a suite of paintings, collages, film, and sound installation across the entirety of Pace’s Hanover Square gallery.

Centring female perspectives and narratives, Olowska’s presentation will develop her explorations into Slavic folklore, mythology, and the collective capabilities of, and our intrinsic connection to, nature.

Titled after Olowska’s eponymous video installation, first included in the artist’s 2022 exhibition at Kistefos Museum in Norway, Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas reimagines Slavic mythological deities and demons in new modernist lights. The Mamuna, literally translated from Polish as strangewife, is a female swamp demon closely associated with rivers, streams, and thickets. Historically characterised as menacing, Olowska portrays her Mamunas as earthly androgynous nymphs, more magical than malicious.

Large-scale paintings, each titled after deities from the Slavic pantheon, feature Olowska’s Mamuna-muses gathered amongst the birch and pine forests of northern Europe. By using found fashion photographs as the basis for her compositions—from sources such as Polish Vogue, and the photographers Arthur Elgort and Branislav Šimončík—the artist subverts mass media and fine art to recover female mythological figures from their two-dimensional past. In these paintings, women commune with their surroundings, with themselves, and with the viewer.