photo from Lokal_30 Gallery, Warsaw
Eastern Promises
Among the well-established galleries from New York, Paris, and London showing works at Art Basel Switzerland last month, a smattering of galleries from Central and Eastern Europe stood out, showing video installations, photographs, and huge landscape paintings: Warsaw’s Foksal Gallery Foundation; Ljubljana, Slovenia’s Galerija Gregor Podnar; and the Hunt Kastner Gallery from Prague. They are among those from the former East bloc fast gaining a reputation as important players on the international contemporary-art scene. And it wasn’t just at the main art fair that the Eastern European galleries promoted their wares; across town at the Liste Young Art Fair, which highlights up-and-coming artists, galleries from Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania showcased pieces by such artists as Janek Simon of Poland, who displayed vials of holy water next to laboratory-analysis of its chemical composition, and Bulgaria’s Kamen Stoyanov, whose Plaster Me installation featured a talking stuffed tiger.