I met Karolina Gacke on an idyllic Burmese beach a few years ago. She was on holiday from her day job of teaching English in Bangkok and was painting out of a studio literally on the beach in Ngapali, a coastal village on the Indian Ocean in Rakhine State. She spent a couple of months there each year, then returned to her “real” work in Bangkok and, for part of the year, in Brixen, South Tyrol. (Her background is neither Thai nor South Tyrolean. She is actually of Polish birth, raised in Nigeria.) I was very much taken by her paintings. Wonderful use of color and the light that comes from the intensity of the sun and the clarity of the skies in that part of the world. She painted the women who sold fruit to us tourists on the beach and I thought she captured them beautifully. When I left Ngapali she gave me a hand-made farewell card with a watercolor of one of those women, the basket on her head, the sea and the sky behind her, the sand at her feet. It is my favorite souvenir of my time in that part of the world.
I have kept up with Karolina over the last couple of years, visiting her and her partner (and Muse, Benno) in Thailand and in South Tyrol, she visiting us on a trip to the US last year. And this year we received word that she was having a show in Brixen, the culmination of a year’s work on a project she called “10.” We had been planning a trip to Europe for the Fall, our last chance for the 2017 Biennale in Venice, so we arranged to visit Brixen as well.
One of the dangers of befriending artists is that they are going to have a show and you’re not going to like the work. Some time has gone into my study of how to talk about a work without offering my opinion on it. It is an art form in itself and I struggle with it nearly as much as my artist friends struggle with their real art. I worried about the exhibition in Brixen. It turned out I had nothing to worry about. “10” is a wonderful show of ten works, in a variety of media, centered on the Ten Commandments. Karolina’s been asked about her religiosity because of the theme, but these are not “religious” paintings. They are, though, political works, thoughtful works and terribly creative works. They are the products of a truly “emerging” artist who is finding her way through some very interesting problems she has posed to herself and has come up with some very unique and, to the eye of this beholder, beautiful solutions.
The colors of the paintings are still vivid, as vivid as anything she has done in Burma or Thailand. And there are layers and layers of paint. But now there is also stitching and collage. There is wood and canvas and string. And there are messages and questions that are posed and in need of your answers. These are not your usual images of the commandments, not your typical pictures of theft and greed and murder and the worship of false idols. Where do you stand? What will you accept? What do you contribute to this defilement of our planet, our humanity and our birthright? Where do you, we, go from here?
The exhibition is being kept together, and, it is hoped, will travel to a number of venues in Europe. I would love to see the work in a small white-box gallery on the Lower East Side. I would love to watch people looking at the work. It is not your usual cutting-edge artwork. I think the change would do all of us some good.