Editorial - KUNST Magazin

Galerieprofil
Isabella Czarnowska
„Mir liegt die Art, so zu denken“
Gallery Profile:
Isabella Czarnowska
“That’s the type of thinking that suits me”
Text: Julika Nehb Translation: Brian Poole
Nach Stationen in Stuttgart und Köln Mitte der
1980er-Jahre führt Isabella Czarnowska seit 2006
unter ihrem Namen ihre Galerie in der Rudi-
Dutschke-Straße. Mit 18 Jahren war sie von Polen
nach Stuttgart zum Kunstgeschichtsstudium
gekommen – an der Fakultät saßen Geisteswissenschaftler
mit Studenten der Akademie der
Künste in gemeinsamen Veranstaltungen. Wichtige
Begegnungen mit Künstlern ergaben sich während
einer Romanistikvorlesung von Jean-Pierre Dubost.
„Plötzlich war daraus eine private Veranstaltung
Markus Döbeli: Malerei, 2011 (Installationsansicht). Acryl auf
Leinwand, 235 x 408 cm ©, Courtesy: Galerie Isabella Czarnowska,
Berlin. Foto: Uwe Walter
Alina Szapocznikow integrierte Abgüsse einzelner Körperpartien
in den skulpturalen Prozess. Die mit den Körperpartien verbundenen
Erfahrungen wandeln sich so zum Symbolischen. 1972 schrieb sie über
den Körper, er sei „unter all den Symptomen der Unbeständigkeit das
empfindlichste, die einzige Quelle aller Freude, allen Schmerzes und
aller Wahrheit.“ Alina Szapocznikow: Bouches en marche (Schreitende
Münder), 1966. Farbiger Polyester, 53 x 15 x 16 cm © Courtesy Galerie
Isabella Czarnowska, Berlin, Foto: Stephan Höck
geworden. Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard … Wir
kamen mit den großen Philosophen persönlich
ins Gespräch.“ Offen für unterschiedlichste
Quellen der Inspiration spielte Czarnowska mit
After spending some time in Stuttgart and Cologne
in the mid-eighties, Isabella Czarnowska has now
been operating a gallery under her name in the
Rudi-Dutschke-Straße since 2006. At the age of
18 she moved from Poland to Stuttgart in order to
study art history, in a faculty where students of the
humanities attended courses with students of the
Academy of Fine Arts. Important encounters with
artists took place during the lectures of the Romance
scholar Jean-Pierre Dubost. “Suddenly it became a
private event. Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard… We engaged
in conversations
personally with the
great philosophers.”
Open to the most
various sources
of inspiration,
Czarnowska played
with the idea of
naming her first
gallery, which she
opened in Stuttgart
in 1986, the “Electric
Ladyland” in honour
of her revered Jimi
Hendrix. “Of course
that’s an impossible
metaphor: running a
gallery in a manner
in which someone
else makes music.
But that’s the type
of thinking that suits
me.” Czarnowska’s
type of thinking
has a lot to do with
freedom, both in the mind and in action. And that
is very much typical for her approach to gallery
work. “A programmatic gallery constructs a modus
of similarity in order to narrow down one specific
formal interest among many. That’s not enough for
me.” The conviction that the quality of a work of art
cannot be defined by external categories alone also
explains her dissatisfaction with the mechanisms at
work in the artistic world of the German capital that
are based upon arbitrary selection.
What she liked most about Stuttgart was its strong
sense of citizenry. “The Publisher Gerd Hatje
purchased a photograph by Louise Lawler from me.
And even before leaving he called the department
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