Dimensions: 72 x 88 cm
Signed, dated, numbered, and labeled on a sticker on the back: 'ŁÓDŹ KALISKA | NUDES DESCENDING THE STAIRS AT SCHOOL | 2002 | 72 cm x 88 cm | Giclée & Fine Art | 6/6 | [artists’ signatures]'
Łódź Kaliska stamp on the reverse
ed. 6/6
Provenance
private collection, Warsaw
Biography
The group consists of Marek Janiak, Andrzej Kwietniewski, Adam Repecki, Andrzej Świetlik, and Makary (Andrzej Wielogórski). It was founded in 1979 amid scandal as a neo-avant-garde group aimed at exploring aspects of vision and photomedia-based documentation, drawing on the tradition of conceptual art, primarily in the fields of photography, experimental film, and performance. In 1980–81, it shifted its artistic program toward a decidedly more Dadaist-Surrealist direction (expressed through happenings and anarchism), attacking and ridiculing the Polish neo-avant-garde movement while highlighting the absurdity of life in the People’s Republic of Poland. Kwietniewski and Janiak wrote many manifestos during this time, including, for example, Janiak’s manifesto “The Art of Embarrassment,” which was significant for the 1990s. From the second half of the 1990s onward, thanks in part to their television productions (the triptych *I Remember, I Remember, I Remember...*), Łódź Kaliska entered the mainstream of mass media and politics. But everything in their work—including the artists themselves and their muses (models)—became both an element and the subject of a never-ending game with a hedonistic message.
