Art, Animation

By PATRICIA DONOVAN

News Services Staff

THE UNIVERSITY at Buffalo Art Gallery is presenting an exhibition of contemporary art from Poland through May 31. In connection with the exhibit, the gallery will present an evening of eye-opening animated films by Poland's Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, two of the greatest animators of our era.

The exhibit, "Art in Poland: New Directions," is currently in the University Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus.

Gallery hours are 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. For information, call the gallery at 645-6912 or 645-6976.

The exhibit, featuring the work of eight emerging Polish artists, is presented as part of the University Gallery's Curatorial Initiative Program, which offers UB faculty and staff the opportunity to curate art exhibitions.

The show's curators are Carol Zemel, professor of art history at UB, and Maria Hussakowska-Szyzko, professor of modern art at Krak÷w's Jagiellonian University and participating scholar in the UB-Jagiellonian University exchange program during the spring, 1996 semester. Zemel and Hussakowska-Szyzko selected the exhibitors during a 1995 tour of museums and galleries in the Polish cities of Krak÷w, Lodz and Warsaw.

Exhibitors are photographer Piotr Jaros, well-known feminist photographer Natalia Lach-Lachowicz, printmaker Hanna Michalska, painter Jaroslaw Modzelewski, sculptor Maria Peninskaya-Beres, installation/performance artist Joanna Rajkowska, visual artist Robert Rumas and sculptor Brigida Serafin.

Coinciding with the "Art in Poland" show is a second Curatorial Initiative project organized by Brian Henderson, professor of media study at UB. It features work by two of the world's greatest animators, Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, considered among the best of our age.

The screening will take place from 4-6 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts. It is free of charge and open to the public. Borowczyk will be represented by "Les Astronautes" (1959), "Joachim's Dictionary" (1965) and "Renaissance" (1963). The exhibition of Lenica's work will include "Monsieur Tete" (1959), "A" (1965), "Labyrinth" and his monumental work, "Landscape" (1965).

In his 1973 book, "The Animated Film," film historian Ralph Stephenson wrote that "between them, Lenica and Borowczyk have done more than any other cartoonist, not only in Poland but anywhere, to raise the status of the cartoon to a serious art, one that can move us to pity and terror, one that can match in range and depth the tragi-comedy of the human condition."


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