Jolanta Marcolla
Jolanta Marcolla studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, which is also where she met Zdzisław Sosnowski, Dobrosław Bagiński, and Janusz Haka. Together with these colleagues, she founded the group “Galeria Sztuki Aktualnej” (Gallery of Current Art). In 1974, she produced her diploma project—a canvas in which the warp was painted black and the weft white—as a conceptual reaction to painterly compositions both abstract and figurative. This minimalist object employed a structuralist approach to a traditional and conservative medium. Marcolla’s work proceeded to evolve toward the world of
film, video, and photography, where she further developed this tautological method. She had also interned at the local state television station during her studies, and the theoretical component of her diploma submission—based on research into the visual structure of television broadcasts as applied to advertising and propaganda—was directly linked to her observations at that time. Marcolla’s interest in video technology led her to produce works of her own in this medium as early as 1975. It was at a TV studio in Łódź that she managed to realize the series entitled “Dimensions.” There, the artist arranged situations where communication is mediated through the TV screen or where the video image of the situation is juxtaposed with the situation itself. Her moving image and photographic works frequently focus on undermining the objectivity of what is visually represented. Many of these works depict herself and question the conventions governing the representation of the female model. In “Autodescription” (“Autoopisanie,” 1974), for example, she annotates self-portraits with descriptions of her mood or elements of her costume. The artist has also worked as an illustrator of children’s books since 1976, and for a number of years she ran her own publishing house (Wydawnictwo Jedyne Takie). D.M.
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