Pawel Althamer

Pawel Althamer (born 1967) is a contemporary Polish sculptor, collaborative artist, and creator of installations and video art. In 2000 he participated in Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He won the Vincent Award in 2004. In 2007 he presented the exhibition One of many with the Nicola Trussardi Foundation.

His longest-running collaboration is with the Nowolipie Group, an organisation in Warsaw for adults with mental or physical disabilities, to whom he has been teaching a Friday night ceramics class since the early 1990s. In 2008 Althamer arranged for the group to wear matching overalls and take a trip on a biplane, which became the subject of a short film by Althamer’s frequent collaborator, Artur Z.mijewski (Winged, 2008).

Althamer was part of the so-called Kowalski Studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, along with many of today’s leading generation of Polish artists, including Artur Z.mijewski and Katarzyna Kozyra. Under the working title ‘Common Space—Private Space’, Kowalski foregrounded the work of art as an effect of complex non-verbal communication performed by artists in interaction with each other, neutralising individualism: ‘each of the participants had at his/her disposal “a space of their own” […], where they could build elements of their own visual language, and the “common space” open to everyone, where they could conduct simultaneous dialogues with the other participants. All without using words.’