Piotr Uklanski at Gagosian

Art in America, June-July, 2008 by Edward Leffingwell

In a flamboyant introduction to the cultural and military history of his native Poland, Piotr Uklanski, who lives in New York and Warsaw, dressed the far wall of an imposing and very long foyer with the flat-pleated drapes ordinarily used to skirt a dais. High upon the blood-red expanse, blocky Styrofoam letters spelled out the artist's name and then "Bialo-Czerwona"--which is to say "white-red," slang for the bicolor Polish flag--followed by the exhibition's dates, as though aligning it with the anniversaries of a revolution. Given his role as filmmaker of Summer Love: The First Polish Western (2007), which he wrote, directed, produced, styled in the manner of a spaghetti western and screened at film festivals and museums, Uklanski may well have had theater curtains in mind.

Drawing on spectacle, he fabricated a version of the heraldic emblem of Poland as a 13-by-7-by-12-foot eagle that stood sentinel to the work (all 2008) that followed. Made of sprayed white foam and gesso on a steel armature, the eagle featured half-folded wings supported by stylized worker figures in the pose of Leonardo's Vitruvian man. Untitled (Pentecost), a vast multicolored site-specific mosaic of crockery, demonstrated the power of kitsch as it descended from (or ascended to) a skylight in diagonal rays of blue, yellow and green plates, cups, saucers and other objects. A cluster of pottery hovered above like the Pentecostal dove or tongues of flame to which Uklanski's title refers. A darkened gallery was given over to Untitled (Christmas Creche Scenes), a forest of elaborate cathedral-like structures of tinfoil, cardboard and wood incorporating nativity scenes electrically illuminated from within; these examples of a folk art associated with the city of Krakow were found or commissioned by the artist.

Poland, a steel-framed, 12-by-19 1/2-foot, two-part representation of the Polish flag, dominated another gallery, the bands of red and white enamel painted on the reverse side of a sheet of glass. The flag took on human form in Untitled (Solidarity), two 10-by-15-foot C-prints. Photographed from above at a shipyard to commemorate the union-worker uprising of 1980, hundreds of participants dressed in the colors of the flag formed a living logo of the Solidarity party, in an image that recalls Gursky in its scope and detail. The second shot shows the participants dispersing, perhaps a reference to the movement's current status as a trade union with diminishing influence on contemporary politics.

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Six paintings, named for neighborhoods of Warsaw, in glossy resin on canvas, none less than 11 feet high and one nearly 20 feet long, allude to the tens of thousands of soldiers killed and wounded and the quarter-million civilians killed during the failed uprising against the Nazis in 1944. Polished white grounds are figured with red discs suggesting bullet holes, or flow with blood-red streams, culminating in an all-red painting. A 16 1/2-foot fist of steel tubes and varnish marks Poland's bloody history and can be read either as a symbol of the power of the oppressor or resistance to it. Dedicating his exhibition to the "Bialo-Czerwona," Uklanski addresses love for country and celebrates the proto-democratic politics of Solidarity, the beliefs of the Polish people and their survival through a century of horrifying wars and repression.