The Self-Fulfilling Image aims to create a photograph that is both the result and the cause of its own existence, bringing to life this photograph through a performance. Conceptually, the project takes its cue from the idea of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”, which creates the conditions that makes it become true. At the same time, this photograph takes its inspiration from the “one image story” in the manner of the Renaissance tradition depicting different sequences of the lives of Biblical figures as a visual narrative for a complete story. The Self-Fullfilling Image merges both propositions into single project: a large photograph placed into a specific venue and brought to life through a performance.The “hero” of the photograph is the artist, Nicolas Grospierre. The Self-Fullfilling Image appears at first glance like a simple urban landscape photograph, but is in fact an intellectual game and a commentary on his own situation as an artist in New York. The photograph depicts a wide-angle landscape of a street of Chelsea seen from a bird’s eye view. Chelsea as the heart of the NY art scene. In the first sequence, Nicolas Grospierre is seen walking in the street carrying a huge framed photograph. This photograph is the same one that the viewer is looking at, and which is currently being described. In a second sequence, further down the street, the artist is meeting with someone, a gallerist, to whom he is presenting the photograph. The third sequence represents the opening of Nicolas Grospierre’s exhibition in a gallery: the photograph hangs on a wall of the space, and Nicolas is in discussion with a person, possibly the gallerist. And, finally, in one of the windows of the street buildings, one can distinguish a reflection of a person taking a photograph from the other side of the street: it is the artist taking the picture.The performance is what is actually happening in the third sequence of the photograph, i.e. a real opening of a show, in a Chelsea gallery, with the actual photograph hanging on the wall of the gallery where it is seen hanging in the picture. The actors of the performance are the viewers that came to the opening: they are part of the picture which they are looking at.
The Picture Which Grows, a project carried out in the apartment of photographer Tadeusz Sumiński is an attempt to confront, in the shape of a photographic installation, the ideas of tidiness and untidiness, the static and the dynamic, order and entropy. It is also a clash of the order informing the archive of Tadeusz Sumiński and a method aiming to disturb this order.
In the heart of a deserted office building, Nicolas Grospierre has recreated a dreamlike winter garden. For a few days, before the picturesque, glass and metal structure is destroyed, the artist has devised in its core an illusory and infinite space. The Glass Trap is an attempt at capturing the fleeting soul of a soc-modernist pyramid placed on its head.
The Glass Trap is a premiere for Nicolas Grospierre inasmuch as he has willingly put aside his primary medium, photography, to create a living picture. The extraordinary, illusory winter garden set inside an abandoned 1980’s office building that will shortly be destroyed is a typical site specific installation inspired by the venue, and imagined as an addendum to its history. The glass cube filled with plants is the only living element in a building destined for destruction. The installation is at the same time a kind of mental emergency exit, but also as an amazing kaleidoscope opening in front of the very eyes of the viewer an endless space full of vegetation, in the heart of a massive but absurd (because built upside down) pyramid.
Grospierre finds once again some potential in a meaningful but abandoned and forgotten place, in this way filling up the alternative topography of the city with yet another unsuspected and surprising situation. The meaning and great strength of the artist’s practice lies in his ability to get under the city’s skin and emphasising the idea that a significant aspect of the city is also the space hidden behind the enigmatic facades of the buildings. In this way, Grospierre expands the notion of public space, immersing in an urban game not only us, viewers, but also intimate office spaces, libraries, and administrations.
Lukasz Gorczyca
The Revolution eats its own… is a site specific piece commissioned to celebrate the 21th anniversary of the first free elections of June 1989 in Poland.
The piece was located in the historic printing house Dom Slowa Polskiego, which in the 1950’s printed communist propaganda, and in the early 1990’s the first non-communist newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. However, with the economic changes that occured in Poland after 1989, this printing house has been shut down, as the value of its site being far greater than itslef, and a new office complex will take its place.
The Revolution eats its own… is a visual and photographic comment to this situation. Georg Büchner said that a revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children, and it seems the capitalist one is no exception to that rule. The printing house is currently in the process of selling all its assets, be it its land, walls, or machines. In a way, it has been a victim of its own activity, as it is the freedom (be it political, but also economic), that it has promoted (with the printing of Gazeta Wyborcza), that has led to its demise.
I have chosen to photograph different parts of the printing house : machines, furniture, walls, and present them as three-dimensional objects that actually look like books, from a distance. They are displayed in an exhibition cabinet that was used to show the printing house’s products, since it seems that they are the few remaining things that the printing house is capable of producing.
In the Mausoleum, Grospierre and Mokrzycka reproduced on a life-size scale the private collection of stuffed animals of Nugzar Dzanishia, who shot them and stuffed them all by himself. More precisely, this collection of 700 animals is the only “living” space of a huge cultural and commercial complex of the 1970’s, now abandonned under the Republic Square in Tblisi, Georgia. Grospierre and Mokrzycka then transfered this photographic frieze in the abandonned underground club-lounge below the Tribune at the foot of the Palace of Culture in Warsaw, where the Communist dignitaries used to assist at the military parades on May 1st. The 15 metre long frieze takes us not only to another place, but also back in time. It is a reference to the wunderkammer of old, but also to the time when propaganda kept hidden what was happening in real life. In this way the stuffed animals, placed in the social realistic interiors of the Tribune are relics of a past, which, not without any reason, is currently being burried.
Through the looking-glass is a site-specific installation achieved as part of the Artloop festival in the Baltic sea resort town of Sopot, Poland.
Olga Mokrzycka and I were invited to create a work which would be installed in a quite singular setting, the Berger Villa: a quasi-abandoned 1900’s mansion located in one of the residential neighbourhoods of Sopot. Most parts of this neo-renaissance villa, built in 1881, have been disused for the last decades, and the derelict looking building sits nowadays amongst tick bushes that used to be a well-tended garden.
The side of the mansion was adorned with a majestic stained-glass orangery, at the centre of which stood a fountain, and where exotic trees could be enjoyed during the cold winter days. It stands completely empty today: the fountain is dried up, and the walls are greyish-brown with accumulated dust. It is this space we were offered to use for our installation.
Observing this orangery, Olga and I realised that putting any kind of alien work of art would destroy the eerie poetry of this place. We decided thus to create a quasi-invisible work, whose effect would only emphasise the orangery’s delicate state of ruin.