Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Often depicting fashionably dressed women as subjects, Polish artist Paulina Olowska uses painting, as well as collage, sculpture, installation, and performance, to weave her way through feminisms, consumerism, and Slavic histories. “Driven by an imperative to reconnect and reinterpret history,” writes Marta Kudelska, “Olowska's fascination with the aesthetics and female-centered histories of Central and Eastern Europe have propelled her to unearth hidden meanings and narratives obscured by time. Her present is thus inhabited by the phantoms of bygone eras, compelling her to manifest these entities anew.” Olowska thus anchors herself in the past as she uncovers and re-presents it, and her works maintain a sensibility of operating outside of both time and dominant social structures. As Jan Verwoert has observed, Olowska is motivated by “the desire to celebrate fashion and consumption outside of—and independently from—the workings of the capitalist system.”