Maciej Toporowicz 1996 Tora Massage Parlor Photograph Silkscreen 20"

Description

“Tora Massage Parlor (parlour), Bankok” 1996, signed and numbered 1/8 by Maciej Toporowicz, a copper toned black & white photograph of a woman’s face with red silkscreen symbol in the lower corner. American, b. 1958 in Bialystok, Poland, lives and works in New York, NY. Maciej Toporowicz is a multimedia artist who employs photography, video, performance, drawing, and other media. At the core of his practice lies subversive irony and fascination with borderline experiences: death, violence, sex, and crime, and with manipulations of seductive advertising. Delivering a cutting commentary on deceits inherent in consumerism, Toporowicz also clearly references Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns whose works themselves became icons of mass culture. He has consistently adopted risk as his creative strategy exposing himself to physical danger or legal problems. From a broader perspective, Toporowicz is engaged with the existential condition of powerlessness vis-a-vis the systems that surround us, the subject he took on in his native Poland, where he grew up under communism becoming sensitive to propaganda, whether in politics or advertising. Toporowicz earned international renown with Obsession (photographs and video, 1993-2001), in which heshowed that decades after the fall of the Third Reich fashion dictators copycat the esthetics of Nazi ideology. This iconic work, first introduced by the artist through clandestine posting actions on the streets of Soho, is in the collection of The Jewish Museum where it was shown in the Mirroring Evil exhibition in 2001. Some of his projects employed illegal public actions like street posting (Obsession, New York, 1994), or stamp mailing (Serial Killers, USA, 1994; and Forza Italia, Italy, 1994 – a set of stamps with Mussolini printed and mailed by the artist from Italy after neo-fascist Forza Italia led by Il Duce‘s granddaughter entered the parliament). The artist was threatened with lawsuits for appropriating well-known logos (Calvin Klein, Gap, Prozac, Shiseido).Toporowicz has consistently risked his health and tested the limits of law. While a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, he founded a performance duo AWACS with Piotr Grzybowski. The element of terror in their works echoed the oppressive reality of the communist regime. Their underground performances staged in Poland under Martial Law, which often involved taking physical risk such as electric shock or drowning, were inspired among others by Viennese Actionism, and were covered in High Performance magazine (Los Angeles, CA; 1982, 1983). Toporowicz left Poland in 1983, and arrived in NYC in 1985 as a political refugee. The artist continues to create political works based on images imprinted in mass culture and doesn’t conceal his own fascination with objects of his critique: American gun culture, fetishization of violence and cult of celebrity. Created at the time of a heated debate over availability of weapons in the US and the role of NRA in national politics, two new series Disney Targets (acrylic on canvas, 2015) and Targets (collages, 2015) refer to his 1993 gouaches:Disney – a series of 6 drawings made with body prints, which sexualized famous cartoon characters, and Serial Killers – 42 portraits composed by fingerprints. In Car Plates (acrylic on canvas, 2015), he recreated license plates of automobiles involved in famous actual or cinematic death scenes: the Lincoln Continental in JFK’s assassination, the Ford V8 from Bonnie and Clyde, or James Dean‘s Porsche Spyder. In Car Crashes(archival pigment prints, 2015), he portrayed iconic wrecks of cars in which James Dean and Jackson Pollock were killed, the work itself referencing Andy Warhol’s interest in death as subject of popular culture. Toporowicz’s works were exhibited at The Jewish Museum, P.S.1, Bronx Museum, Franklin Furnace, and Lombard Fried Fine Arts – in New York; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY; Museum of Modern Art, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski, and Jewish Historical Institute – in Warsaw, Poland; Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow (MOCAK), and Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, Poland; Pori Art Museum, Pori, Finland; Museo D’Arte Moderne, Bolzano, Italy; International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany; and Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic, among others. They are featured in such collections as The Jewish Museum, New York, and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, and were covered by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Time,New Yor ker, Village Voice, Der Spiegel, Liberation, Art in America, Artforum, Art Press, Flash Art, Art & Antiques, High Performance, salon.com, Creative Review, and others.

Condition

Very Good - See pictures

Dimensions

20.25” x 16.25” x 1” / Sans Frame - 19.5” x 15.5” (Width x Height x Depth)