Winter in Saint Petersburg by Paulina Olowska

Paulina Olowska and Deborah Turbeville

Widows of the Wind

Past
Nov 22, 2024 – Feb 22, 2025
Geneva

Pace is pleased to announce Widows of the Wind, an exhibition conceived by Paulina Olowska for its Geneva gallery, featuring new paintings in dialogue with photographs by Deborah Turbeville. view from November 21, 2024, to February 22, 2025, Widows of the Wind marks Olowska’s first solo show in Geneva and furthers her exploration of evocative artistic and curatorial practices. For this exhibition, Olowska will stage a tableau vivant that weaves together reflections on fashion, commerce, painting, photography, and the atmospheric forces that shape these realms.

On Olowska’s multilayered practice—spanning painting, collage, sculpture, video, installation, and performance—is underscored by a curatorial methodology that treats the past, particularly the histories of female experience and perception, as her primary material. This critical, always female, gaze is shaped by the intricate connections between the locations tied to her muses, the settings of her exhibitions, and her personal experiences of living and working in Eastern Europe. Through these posthumous collaborations with women artists, Olowska gives texture and dimension to the broader histories that they share.

For Widows of the Wind, Olowska has extended and reshaped the dialogue between her own work and that of Turbeville, first articulated in her 2023 exhibition, Resonance, at Kurimanzutto in Mexico City in collaboration with MUUS Collection. If Resonance communed with Turbeville’s work like fluid, wavering reverberations, the artistic conversation present in Widows of the Wind can be read through the refractive distortion of a sheet of European winter ice.

Untitled (Anastasia Melnikova), from the series "Studio St. Petersburg, by Deborah Turbeville — Deborah Turbeville, *Untitled (Anastasia Melnikova)*, from the series "Studio St. Petersburg", Saint Petersburg, Russia 1994 © Deborah Turbeville / MUUS collection

Turbeville, a groundbreaking fashion editor, photographer, and artist, played a key role in elevating fashion photography into the realm of avant-garde art, alongside figures like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. However, Turbeville’s approach contrasted with the 'urban erotic underworld' of her male peers, favoring a delicate, introspective female gaze. While her art photography often bears the marks of scratches and printing manipulations, the photographs Olowska has selected are more commercial in nature, created as advertisements for high fashion. This tension—between their moody, introspective portrayal of the female psyche and their function as promotional objects—forms the crux of Olowska's artistic response.

Four of the selected photographs from MUUS Collection, from Turbeville’s Stables of Strelna series, depict women draped over the crumbling ruins of a palatial St. Petersburg estate. In two others, taken from editorial shoots in 1980 and 1994, the models' faces are partially obscured, their gazes averted from the camera, fixed on something unseen. Cloaked in fur-trimmed garments and shrouded in the sepia-toned haze of the images, these women appear dislocated from both time and place. Paired with Olowska’s paintings of solitary women in frozen, desolate landscapes, they create a fragmented, collaged drama of disconnection.

While photography captures a moment in time with immediacy, both mediums demand patience, skill, and dedication in different ways. Olowska’s work invites reflection on how these differing temporalities—one instantaneous, the other more prolonged—shape meaning. How do the shifts in time, process, and medium influence the narratives these works convey, particularly in their portrayal of the female experience?

The gallery’s location on the shores of Lake Geneva plays a key role in Olowska’s curation. A dark, serrated floor installed five centimeters above the ground will echo the lake’s reflective winter qualities, inverting interior and exterior space. Drawing inspiration from A Year Without Winter, a poetic investigation of climatic extremes edited by Dehlia Hannah, Olowska will symbolically resurrect the conditions under which Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein during the ‘year without a summer’ in 1816—also on the shores of Lake Geneva. Like Olowska, Shelley and Turbeville both created works infused with the environmental conditions of their making. In this way, Olowska illuminates the porous boundary between the inner psyche and the external world.

In the final painting Olowska has made for Widows of the Wind, the winter landscape is entirely depopulated, with clusters of bare trees framing a frozen river and a receding expanse of snow. Despite the isolation, their proximity to the viewer suggests claustrophobic tension. This scene, which represents the landscape around the artist studio in Rabka, Lesser Poland, marks a technical and conceptual evolution in her nearly twenty-five-year career. Inspired in part by Józef Chełmoński’s winter landscapes, Olowska has explored the challenge of painting snow and emptiness, distilling the landscape down to minimal textures while reflecting on earlier themes of solitude, evident in her 2000s paintings of faceless, lonely women. These new works continue her investigations into the interplay between abstraction and figuration, recalling Kazimir Malevich’s peasant paintings, where fashion and form intersect. In Paysage d'Hiver (2024), the absence of figures shifts the focus entirely to the landscape, turning the empty winter scene into a meditation on isolation, memory, and the emotional weight of the natural world.

Featured Works

Paysage d'Hiver by Paulina Olowska — Paulina Olowska, *Paysage d'Hiver*, 2024, Oil on canvas, 200 cm x 290 cm ( 78-3/4" x 114-3/16")

Icy Water by Paulina Olowska — Paulina Olowska, *Icy Water*, 2024, Oil on canvas, 190 cm × 270 cm (74-13/16" × 106-5/16")

Birch Forest by Paulina Olowska — Paulina Olowska, *Birch Forest*, 2024, Oil on canvas, 190 cm × 270 cm (74-13/16" × 106-5/16")

Portrait - JPG - Photography by Jacqueline Sobiszewski.png — Portrait of Paulina Olowska. Photo © Jacqueline Sobiszewski

Paulina Olowska

Paulina Olowska’s multifarious practice spans painting, collage, sculpture, video, installation, and performance. Her work is deeply engaged with the political and social histories of Eastern Europe, American consumerism and pop culture, feminism, and the aesthetics of fashion advertisements.

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Deborah Turbeville

Deborah Turbeville moved to New York with ambitions to study drama when she was nineteen years old. Instead, she was discovered by the fashion designer Claire McCardell, who hired Turbeville as an assistant and house model. While working for McCardell, she met Diana Vreeland, the famed editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Their introduction led to Turbeville being offered a job as an editor at the magazine.

Disinterested in her editorial work at Harper’s Bazaar and later at Mademoiselle, she began experimenting with photography in the 1960s. She took part in a workshop led by Richard Avedon and art director Marvin Israel in 1966. From there, she began her photographic career, mainly working for magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Mirabella. In 1981, Turbeville was commissioned by Jaqueline Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, to photograph disused rooms in the Palace of Versailles. The book, Unseen Versailles, won an American Book Award, for its rare look into the Palace’s off-limits decaying grandeur. Turbeville published many books of her photography, including Studio St. Petersburg, The Voyage of the Virgin Maria Candelaria and Newport Remembered. Posthumous publications include Comme des Garçons 1981, a series of photographs she took during the 1980s in collaboration with the fashion house and its designer, Rei Kawakubo. Turbeville died in 2013, having left an indelible mark on the world of photography. Her work is collected by major institutions worldwide, including the National Portrait Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

MUUS Collection

MUUS Collection is a group of photography archives based in the United States that brings together bodies of work that mark major turning points in history. As a functional archive with more than half a million images and supporting ephemera, MUUS Collection preserves and promotes the works of the estates it represents, including Deborah Turbeville, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Larry Fink, Fred W. McDarrah, André de Dienes, and Alfred Wertheimer.