“Temporarily Embarrassed Moonwalkers’ is an exhibition by Adam Nehring, Katarzyna Wyszkowska, and Adam Kozicki – three artists whose childhood fell in the 1990s. Socialization in the shadow of an optimistic narrative about the success of the transformation has proved to be extremely formative for their perception of late capitalist reality. Their creative practice revolves around the links between the individual and the system, as well as the space that vividly reflects the principles of this new world. Looking into the abyss of Eternal Precarity from behind hedges of giant cedars, it is hard to believe in the rationality of the invisible hand of the free market.

This perspective offers glimpses of unfulfilled expectations, social pressures, and omnipresent strangeness that do not quite fit into the vision of the best of possible
worlds. This is how Wyszkowska’s brocade golems and Nehring’s parallel multi-worlds are created – seedy bars inspired by the Alcatraz prison and private luxury cemeteries whose counterparts exist. The same world features – as portrayed by Kozicki in his paintings – the spruced-up landlords amidst the shabby places they offer for rent, and the workers who spill out of shabby commuter trains and eat breakfast for dinner to save time.

Hyperrealism – operating under completely different principles than its counterpart embedded in the history of art – provides a faithful documentation of the paradoxes witnessed by Nehring, Wyszkowska, and Kozicki. In this context, “faithful” doesn’t just mean that it was the case. To make things worse, it still is the case.”

Aleksy Wojtowicz, curator