For fifteen years now, the figure of Alcina has fascinated and inspired painter Pola Dwurnik. The exhibition New Choreographies of Alcina at Krupa Gallery in Wrocław presents the artist’s evolving relationship to the symbolism the figure of the witch from a 16th-century epic poem can convey over the years – from a very personal one, through a feminist perspective, to transcending an anthropocentric stance.
The witch Alcina is one of the side characters of the monumental Italian poem Orlando Furioso, a 16th-century chivalric epic by Ludovico Ariosto. In this longest work of its kind in the history of European literature, the shape-shifting witch with the power to turn her unfortunate lovers into animals appears briefly is present on the pages of only three of the 46 hymns. However, this did not prevent Alcina from becoming one of the poem’s most distinctive and memorable heroines, with her story inspiring Georg Friedrich Händel’s 1735 opera Alcina, among others.
“Alcina is a threat because she is independent. The other women appearing in the epic are virtuous ladies, devoted to their masters. She is the only one with a personality here, living and looking as she wants. What she loses, what is taken away from her, is precisely her independence”.
— Pola Dwurnik
It was through his work that Pola Dwurnik became acquainted with the story of Alcina fifteen years ago. In Händel’s version, as in Ariosto’s, the sorceress with dark powers is defeated, her kingdom reduced to ashes, and the men imprisoned in animal form turn back human. Evil loses, good triumphs. So everything is as it should be, right? Listening to the arias of the sorceress several hundred years after the opera’s premiere, Dwurnik found it hard to agree with such a version. “Alcina is a threat because she is independent”, the artist says. “The other women appearing in the epic are virtuous ladies, devoted to their masters. She is the only one with a personality here, living and looking as she wants. What she loses, what is taken away from her, is precisely her independence”.
In the early 2010s, Dwurnik created eight self-portraits in which she was accompanied by a different animal, into which eight of her former partners were enchanted with brush and oil paint. The paintings then became the series Apolonia’s Garden (Ogród Apolonii), shown at Dwurnik’s solo exhibition at Cracow’s MOCAK in 2012. As the works were created while listening to the bars composed by Händel, one could say she somewhat impersonated the opera’s title character. But over a decade later, in the works created from 2015 onward and now presented in Wrocław, what comes to the fore is the story of Alcina, who no longer takes on the face of Dwurnik. However, the abandonment of the autothematic act does not make the works less personal or less immersed in the painter’s individual outlook, experiences, fascinations, and inspirations.
“One reference per painting is not enough for me. When I paint, I compact my inspiration, because it is important to me to go beyond what is possible in reality; painting should go beyond its limits”.
— Pola Dwurnik
There is a certain pleasure in picking up and untangling the threads interwoven on the canvases, leading the viewer to numerous works from the history of art and literature, opera and contemporary dance, theatre, and fashion. Dwurnik is extremely democratic in her choice of inspirations. She does not shy away from combining quotations from various disciplines. With a twinkle in her eye, she delves into what prompted the creation of specific paintings, mentioning in one breath the names of artists (from Wilhelm Kaulbach and Vincent van Gogh to Anselm Kiefer and her father Edward Dwurnik), writers of various eras (Mary Shelley next to Olga Tokarczuk), fashion (photographs by Richard Avedon, Björk in a swan dress designed by Marjan Pejoski), or pop culture phenomena (such as Squid Games).
“One reference per painting is not enough for me”, explains the artist. “When I paint, I compact my inspiration, because it is important to me to go beyond what is possible in reality; painting should go beyond its limits”. The best example of this “densification” can be seen in the closing canvases of the exhibition, functioning as a kind of postscript to the series. There, the main character is surrounded by a wreath of human hands. Each is portrayed with a different, distinctive gesture – the Salvador Mundi blessing and the yogic munda, the V sign and the arrangement of fingers communicating ‘OK’ and ‘I love you’ in sign language, and even… the Addams family’s Thing.
The multiplicity of references is matched by the formal diversity of the presented set of works. Although the exhibition also includes works on paper, sculpture, and even a collage made of postage stamps, the oil paintings predominate with each having a different format, composition, and colour palette. Each work is a coherent entity, another page in the story woven by the painter. The exhibition is divided into chapters as Dwurnik consistently leads the viewer through her own linearly constructed variation on the witch Alcina’s story. What is crucial to the content of this tale is the artist’s evolving relationship with this character over the years and what symbolism she may carry – from a very personal one, through a feminist perspective, to moving beyond an anthropocentric stance.
“These paintings are still very much feminist: ‘the wicked witch’ is not someone who deserves punishment, but dignity – she is, after all, one of the first female characters in literature to stand on her own”.
— Pola Dwurnik
In contrast to the story’s finale by Ariosto or Händel, the first portraits show Alicina in triumph – on a throne surrounded by numerous animal subjects, raised towards the sky by a flock of white birds, clothed in storks or badgers swarming around her (the latter, incidentally, are a recurring element of Dwurnik’s witch iconography). In the following paintings, however, there is less and less of her. She gives place to animals that grow in number and strength. “These paintings are still very much feminist: ‘the wicked witch’ is not someone who deserves punishment, but dignity – she is, after all, one of the first female characters in literature to stand on her own. What is changing, however, is how I portray animals. In a wave of research into their emotionality, a reflection on their empowerment, I want to reread them as far as possible from the archetypes that function in culture”, Dwurnik explains. “It’s no longer about what goes on in the heads of people turned into animals, because they don’t have to be metaphors for human qualities – a fox is not a thief or a liar, a bear does not necessarily symbolise strength. They are sentient beings with their own stories, issues, habits, and how they feel and see the world is a mystery to us”.
The titular ‘new choreographies’ can thus be read as a movement present in the story, the changing arrangements and positions Alcina takes towards the animals: storks, badgers, crocodiles, foxes, tits, elephants, suricates, frogs, turtles, giraffes. They grow from background characters to protagonists, boldly filling the canvases, while the witch, previously the centre of the routine, now has to learn the steps of their choreography – or exit the stage. The exhibition at Krupa Gallery has a story-withing-a-story structure, as we move from the final chapter of the story, in which Alcina leaves her world, to the addendum, where she serves the animal community as a nurse, we come to a room where she is not present at all.
As Dwurnik puts it, this “ exhibition in an exhibition” presents a soloist – a fox, portrayed repeatedly and in a very different way to the other paintings. The frame is narrow; we stare into the fox’s face, expressing each time a different, inhuman, yet somehow legible emotion. In the paintings collected here, we do not find a palimpsest of inspiration or a multiplicity of themes. There is a thematic discipline to them, they are focused on one person and their experiences. However, even though the means used by Dwurnik are more sparingly used here, one can spend as much time with the depiction of the fox as it seems to require us to read the portraits of Alcina. To try, standing face to face with the red animal, to unravel its mysteries. And to find an answer to the question jokingly posed a decade ago by the Norwegian group Ylvis but taken very seriously at Pola Dwurnik’s exhibition – What does the fox say?
Pola Dwurnik’s New Choreographies of Alcina is open till February 14 at Krupa Gallery in Wrocław.