The catalogue is designed with the concept of hauntology as its governing principle. The cover displays the artist’s painting Blue Forest (2019), overprinted with a screen-printed layer of blue evoking the surrounding presence of Kistefos’s forest. Her hauntology is punctuated by hauntings and traces of Paulina’s forceful figures: from the women in her paintings casting shadows on the backs of pages to performers emerging from shimmery copper paper. Weaving through the publication are reproductions of her preparatory drawings and ceramic works, printed in silver ink on dark brown paper.
Paulina Olowska’s realist paintings, drawings, and collages borrow imagery from Eastern European and American popular culture creating a cross-cultural reference whilst engaging with the concepts of consumerism, feminism, and design. The selection of works in this exhibition explore the female gaze and the concept Hauntology—a range of ideas referring to the recurrence of elements from the social or cultural past— set within a feminist context. […] As the viewer moves through the gallery spaces they will be followed, perhaps even haunted, by the many female gazes that stare down from the walls, into the far distance or straight ahead, all proudly owning and reasserting their own female histories. In Paulina Olowska’s Her Hauntology, the artist readdresses the balance of history and offers an optimistic interpretation of Hauntology and the future. Bold, proud and, knowing, the figures that punctuate the walls are female spectres from the past with re-imagined futures. (Kate Smith)
