Concept
Looted is a multimedia installation that displays the repainting and subsequent erasing of artworks stolen from museums and private collections in Poland during World War II. The installation investigates the legacy of art pillaged in the wake of war and colonization and asks how we recall histories of loss and disappearance in the present.
Looted is a multiscreen video installation by Polish artist Dorota Mytych that explores the past and present of Polish-owned paintings stolen during World War II. Mytych’s installation shows the hands of four painters—Jessica Houston (Canada), Marcia Teusink (UK), Tracy Grubbs (USA), and Mytych herself—as they repaint works such as Anton van Dyck’s Portrait of a Boy and Joseph Chełmoński’s Shepherd with the Whip in the Meadow. In each video of the installation’s grid, viewers will witness the slow evolution from a blank canvas to a fully-realized recreation of an artwork. Each ends with the artist erasing the image again and leaving the viewer with ghost-like impressions of the original. This cycle repeats, with all four painters continuously creating and erasing additional works. Mytych’s installation acknowledges loss while breathing new life into lost artworks. Like the missing paintings, which exist today only as black-and-white archival photographs, these recreated works endure solely in the installation’s sepia-toned videos. In bringing looted works back into view, Mytych not only showcases temporary acts of resurrection, she also investigates the politics of forgetting and the symbolic power of cultural heritage and appropriation.
Each video of Looted recalls a unique and often convoluted story of appropriation, extraction, and disappearance. Raphael’s Portrait of A Young Man, for example, was hidden during the Polish uprising against Russian imperial rule in November 1830. Initially taken to Paris, it was later returned to Krakow only to be seized by the Nazis in World War II and then disappear for good. In staging a temporary recreation of this lost painting, Looted comments on the inextricable entanglement of art and political history, creativity and power, national and international narratives about meaning and value.
While retracing haunting instances of loss, Looted also celebrates the creative process. Each video begins with the image of a blank canvas until one of the painters’ hands enters the frame and marks the canvas with initial probing strokes. While ambient sounds of brush work, palette knives mixing paint, and other studio noises accompany the videos, we witness scenes of queens, mothers, mountains, boats, kings, and roses emerge on canvas, all spread across the gallery’s multitude of screens. Drawn into the creation process of a painting, visitors may contemplate how art objects and artmaking can offer hope in the face of violence and tyranny. How, they may ask, does art connect present and past and express resilience amid traumatic histories of loss and disappearance?
Looted continues important themes present in Mytych’s previous works such as Tea Leaf Reading (2009), which assembled and dissolved archival images in a looped video. It culminates nearly two decades of her research and material exploration. Mytych grew up amidst the uncertainties of socialist Poland and the country’s ideological transformations. While studying painting with Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronky in Florence, Italy, she immersed herself in the splendors of Renaissance art, which forcefully reminded her of Poland’s rich cultural heritage and the burdens centuries of colonization and war had placed upon it. Mytych now works and lives in Kraków, Poland.