ART BASEL Online Viewing Room: Portals
Louisa Gagliardi, Agnieszka Polska

16.06–19.06.2021

For OVR: Portals, Dawid Radziszewski Gallery is pleased to present a selection of new and recent works by Louisa Gagliardi (b. 1989, Switzerland) and Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985, Poland) – two artists who, in various ways, compose a dream-like world seen through the eyes of a voyeur.

There is a certain state of emergency present in Agnieszka Polska’s works. It derives from the political and social environment of our time. But rather than moralistic references to the challenges of the pandemic, ecological issues, or the rise of nationalistic sentiments, the artist focuses on creating an immersive experience for the audience. As a distant but diligent observer, the viewer becomes a prisoner of the video footage and events unfolding before his eyes. It’s the immersion that charges Polska’s videos with political potential.

Louisa Gagliardi has the ability to capture our relationship to direct surroundings, now readjusted, with restrictions on movement, and forced comfort we have to find in limited quarters. In her works she plays with a surreal perspective of heightened familiarity, balancing on the border of what is private and what is public, trying to capture intimacy in the era of post-pandemic definition of domesticity. Her canvases are unreal and dystopian, yet created with a certain virtuosity.

OVR: Portals is curated by Magali Arriola, Director, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Christina Li, independent curator based in Amsterdam and Hong Kong; and Larry Ossei-Mensah, co-founder of ARTNOIR and Curator-at-Large at BAM, New York City. This first curator-led edition of Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms focuses on artistic practices that interrogate the parameters that have shaped our contemporary condition, both through current and historical lenses.