Until the end of August, Poznan's gallery Art Stations Foundation will exhibit works by Jenny Holzer – one of the greatest American artists today. The artist visited Krakow on the occasion of this year's ArtBoom Festival. She presented an installation For Krakow as part of the Milosz Liberated - Czesław Miłosz Year celebration in Kraków project.
Jenny Holzer's exhibition at Poznan’s Art Stations Foundation features her latest paintings and one of the early granite benches. Three series of paintings will be shown. One of them consist of oil canvass paintings with handprints of American soldiers charged but not necessarily sentenced for committing crimes in Iraq. Above each handprint the censor sought to erase signs allowing identification of the accused by painting them black. The diversity of drawing methods is not a study of formalism and abstraction. The wide range of works and styles unveil subsequent layers of individuals and histories brought together by war. However, Holzer's paintings – based on documentaries revealed as a result of the American Law on Freedom of Information – cannot be read in one way only. As part of the second series of her works, Jenny Holzer presents some heavily censored documents where the artist replaced the black spots of the censor's intervention with colourful elements, transferring them to silk-screen prints. Inspired by Kazimierz Malewicz's Suprematist model of colour and composition, Holzer introduces to formal abstraction an element of choice, arbitrariness and conscious decision. By using this model of painting in relation to governmental documents, Holzer undermines the argument about facelessness of the bureaucratic machine. The artist draws our attention to the fact that it is the individuals, not automatons, that are responsible for rules, choices and enforcement of procedures that result in information being classified as secret by means of censor's black interventions. By her use of colour, Holzer is discretely present within frames of those apparently formal paintings and shows that power and bureaucracy are in fact a collection of individual decisions. Another series of paintings includes maps made by the artist. The paintings, including one shown at the exhibition, are reproductions of slides from a PowerPoint presentation shown in the White House by the U.S. Central Command which presented proposals for strategies for the Iraq invasion. The images allows us an insight into war business, enthusiastic abbreviations for war objectives and procedures and bring to the fore the divide between intentions and what becomes the reality.

Jenny Holzer showed her series of declassified documents at the Venice Biennale 2007 and as part of a large touring exhibition organised by the Foundation Beyeler and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2008-2010).

Holzer belongs to a circle of the most eminent artists of her generation. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Holzer turned to text in posters, stone benches and electronic signs as the basis for her art. With language as her primary medium of expression, Holzer explores the issues of authorship and power while touching upon such important and delicate themes as hope, despair, need and longing. The artist has presented her concepts and arguments related to politics and bitter social reflections in public places and international exhibitions, including in Times Square, London's City Hall, Neue Nationalgalerie and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao. Holzer also represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1990, where she received Leone d'Oro prize for the best pavilion.

Beginning with her 2004 exhibition in Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Holzer has made the study of declassified documents of the US government central to her practice. By incorporating memoranda, sworn statements, e-mails, directives, court sentences and other government materials related to the situation in the Middle East into her paintings, large-scale light projections and electronic signs, Holzer presents the image of war and torture.

Thanks to Jenny Holzer, Krakow inhabitants had an opportunity to see texts by the great Polish poets Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz projected onto the walls of Wawel Castle.

For Krakow instalation is a part of Liberated Miłosz – Czesław Miłosz Year celebration in Kraków, which is operated by Instytut Książki. Projcet subsidised with funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.