ANDRZEJ LACHOWICZ

At the beginning of the seventies, Polish multimedia artist and theorist Andrzej Lachowicz (Vilna, 1939) with his art, gallery and theoretical work achieved in Wroclaw one of the most influential and most open cultural environments in the new artistic practice, and Permafo Gallery (an abbreviation of the words permanent and photo), which he opened together with the artists Natalia Lach Lachowicz, Antoni Dzieduszycki and Zbigniew Dlubak, has become the most fertile of institutions in promoting artistic practice associated with the medium of photography. His creativity and points of view, though based on the postulates of conceptual art and close to the counterculture, kept their intellectual independence, criticism of the unilateral determinations of the role of conceptualization of the creative process and humor, paradox and creative confabulation in the process of the media, particularly photography, transformation of everyday life.
Presented series of photographs Shadows, which Lachowicz captures since 1964, introduces and "materializes" otherwise invisible subject of the photographic process as a central motif of proverbially technical and therefore in the eye of the observer neutrally objective photographic display. This forty years long obsession with the motif of a shadow is a display of an anxious awareness of the continuous and frightening presence of ubiquitous invisible observer-controller and a metaphor for repressed existential anxieties of the modern civilization.