GENEVA.- Pace is presenting Widows of the Wind, an exhibition conceived by Paulina Olowska for its Geneva gallery, featuring new paintings in dialogue with photographs by Deborah Turbeville.
On view from November 21, 2024, to February 22, 2025, Widows of the Wind marks Olowska’s first solo show in Geneva and furthers her exploration of evocative artistic and curatorial practices. For this exhibition, Olowska stages a tableau vivant that weaves together reflections on fashion, commerce, painting, photography, and the atmospheric forces that shape these realms.
Olowska’s multilayered practice—spanning painting, collage, sculpture, video, installation, and performance—is underscored by a curatorial methodology that treats the past, particularly the histories of female experience and perception, as her primary material. This critical, always female, gaze is shaped by the intricate connections between the locations tied to her muses, the settings of her exhibitions, and her personal experiences of living and working in Eastern Europe. Through these posthumous collaborations with women artists, Olowska gives texture and dimension to the broader histories that they share.
For Widows of the Wind, Olowska has extended and reshaped the dialogue between her own work and that of Turbeville, first articulated in her 2023 exhibition, Resonance, at Kurimanzutto in Mexico City in collaboration with MUUS Collection. If Resonance communed with Turbeville’s work like fluid, wavering reverberations, the artistic conversation present in Widows of the Wind can be read through the refractive distortion of a sheet of European winter ice.
Turbeville, a groundbreaking fashion editor, photographer, and artist, played a key role in elevating fashion photography into the realm of avant-garde art, alongside figures like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. However, Turbeville’s approach contrasted with the 'urban erotic underworld' of her male peers, favoring a delicate, introspective female gaze. While her art photography often bears the marks of scratches and printing manipulations, the photographs Olowska has selected are more commercial in nature, created as advertisements for high fashion. This tension—between their moody, introspective portrayal of the female psyche and their function as promotional objects—forms the crux of Olowska's artistic response.
Four of the selected photographs from MUUS Collection, from Turbeville’s Stables of Strelna series, depict women draped over the crumbling ruins of a palatial St. Petersburg estate. In two others, taken from editorial shoots in 1980 and 1994, the models' faces are partially obscured, their gazes averted from the camera, fixed on something unseen. Cloaked in fur-trimmed garments and shrouded in the sepia-toned haze of the images, these women appear dislocated from both time and place. Paired with Olowska’s paintings of solitary women in frozen, desolate landscapes, they create a fragmented, collaged drama of disconnection.
While photography captures a moment in time with immediacy, both mediums demand patience, skill, and dedication in different ways. Olowska’s work invites reflection on how these differing temporalities—one instantaneous, the other more prolonged—shape meaning. How do the shifts in time, process, and medium influence the narratives these works convey, particularly in their portrayal of the female experience?
The gallery’s location on the shores of Lake Geneva plays a key role in Olowska’s curation. A dark, serrated floor installed five centimeters above the ground will echo the lake’s reflective winter qualities, inverting interior and exterior space. Drawing inspiration from A Year Without Winter, a poetic investigation of climatic extremes edited by Dehlia Hannah, Olowska will symbolically resurrect the conditions under which Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein during the ‘year without a summer’ in 1816—also on the shores of Lake Geneva. Like Olowska, Shelley and Turbeville both created works infused with the environmental conditions of their making. In this way, Olowska illuminates the porous boundary between the inner psyche and the external world.
In the final painting Olowska has made for Widows of the Wind, the winter landscape is entirely depopulated, with clusters of bare trees framing a frozen river and a receding expanse of snow. Despite the isolation, their proximity to the viewer suggests claustrophobic tension. This scene, which represents the landscape around the artist studio in Rabka, Lesser Poland, marks a technical and conceptual evolution in her nearly twenty-five-year career. Inspired in part by Józef Chełmoński’s winter landscapes, Olowska has explored the challenge of painting snow and emptiness, distilling the landscape down to minimal textures while reflecting on earlier themes of solitude, evident in her 2000s paintings of faceless, lonely women. These new works continue her investigations into the interplay between abstraction and figuration, recalling Kazimir Malevich’s peasant paintings, where fashion and form intersect. In Paysage d'Hiver (2024), the absence of figures shifts the focus entirely to the landscape, turning the empty winter scene into a meditation on isolation, memory, and the emotional weight of the natural world.
