Gustav Metzger. Works of 1995–2007
Zacheta National Gallery of Art
http://www.zacheta.art.pl

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The Zacheta exhibition presents only a fragment of the rich oeuvre of Gustav Metzger, whose personal history is as fascinating and dramatic as History to which he refers in his works. Born in Nuremberg in 1926 to an Orthodox Jewish family, its roots in Poland, he was sent in 1939 to Great Britain as part of the Refugee Children’s Movement, thanks to which he was saved from the Holocaust. He has never accepted any citizenship and lives as a stateless person. Lives and works chiefly in London.

The exhibition in Zacheta National Gallery of Art presents Metzger’s works from the 90 – the cycle Historic Photographs, which take up the problem of greatest catastrophies, as well as the newest ones, sculptures-installations In Memoriam and Eichmann and the Angel, referring to the tragedy of Holocaust.

The exhibition is divided between four galleries, each of which constitutes a chapter in the narrative. The first of those is called The Killing Fields. Entering the gallery, the viewer has to pass through a corridor on the wall of which there hangs a huge, rastered-out (but still recognisable) photograph of Hungarian Jews undergoing selection on the Auschwitz ramp in 1942. The room presents objects from the Historic Photographs series, referring to the various turning-point events and bloody conflicts of the 20th century: the 1938 Anschluss of Austria, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the napalm air raids against civilian targets in Vietnam in 1972, events from the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or an ecological disaster – the construction of the Twyford Down highway in the UK. The pictures are almost always covered, their visibility is limited or access to them is hindered, as if the artist was referring to certain clichés, the mediated images of those tragedies present in the collective consciousness and memory. Sometimes the viewer is allowed to act. For instance, he can raise a huge curtain and crawl under it to try, from so close a perspective, to examine a huge photo on the floor (To Crawl Into). But instead of really seeing it, he will be able only to guess, to work out, fragments of the image he knows is there: a representation of Viennese Jews forced to clean the sidewalks on their knees following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.

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