Paulina Olowska

Paulina Olowska (b. 1976, Gdansk, Poland) was born in 1976 in Gdansk, Poland, and lives and works in Rabka Zdroj and Krakow, Poland. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois in 1996 and earned an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Gdansk, Poland in 2000.

Paulina Olowska has spent her career as an artist centering women, and their perspectives, in a world that regards them as objects. Women feature across her fashion-inspired paintings, which often use magazine photoshoots as source material. Her portraits often show her female subjects in sharp focus as the world around them dissolves into painterly, blurred abstraction. This body of work has earned her art world notoriety: In 2022, the artist joined the roster of Pace Gallery, which is currently showing her debut solo show, “Squelchy Garden Mules and Mamunas,” at its London location through January 6, 2024.

Olowska’s Pace debut is running concurrently with an expansive show, “Visual Persuasion,” at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, creating a major moment for the artist. In “Visual Persuasion,” the artist has moved into curating, presenting a show of her own work—both new commissions and pieces belonging to the Fondazione’s collection—alongside historical works by other artists that speak to the commodification and liberation of women’s bodies. Installation, videos, and even performances supplement lush, wall-based works like Olowska’s Seductress (2020), which portrays a couple mid-flirtation: an elegant woman holding her hand out to be kissed by an adoring man.

“Visual Persuasion,” which is on view through February 25, 2024, sprawls across the Fondazione’s entire exhibition space—a rarity for the museum, as the show’s curator Irene Calderoni (who is also chief curator of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo ) explained in a walkthrough. A 1970s visual aesthetic recurs in many of the works: Neon lights, allusions to soft-porn cinema, and go-go boots, for example, all feature. Though Olowska was only born in 1976, she cited the decade as the source of her “visual education,” she explained in an interview with Artsy. “I just love it, because it had a spirit of freedom,” she said.

That freedom seems to be the artist’s north star in an exhibition that considers the possibilities and limitations of depicting female sexuality. In the process of exploring these ideas, the artist shines the spotlight on several artists whose works are less well-known than hers. Maja Berezowska, for example, was an early 20th-century Polish painter whose erotic works on paper frequently depict women in charge of their own pleasure. In the exhibition, her work appears in dialogue with several large paintings by Olowska featuring images repurposed from Viva, an erotic magazine for women that was published between 1973 and 1980.