The practically-emptiness of this exhibition eerily befits an artist who disappeared without having a trace in 2018, almost 3 many years soon after she stopped creating artwork amid struggles with schizophrenia identified in the mid-1980s. Titled “When you glimpse into my eyes, you see what?,” the demonstrate incorporates documentation of Ciba’s transient output as a college student at the Academy of Wonderful Arts in Warsaw from 1982 to 1987, as properly as a handful of pictures of her at the time and two pics taken not extensive before she went missing. Most intriguing is a selection of exhibition pictures exhibited inside of a vitrine: daring, glyphlike marks in black-and-white acrylic on substantial sheets hung unfastened in home-sized installations. 1 photograph depicts a sparse composition of angular strains that variously resemble an arrow, a check mark, and a triangular peak versus a crimson track record that curator Zuzanna Wilska suspects was stitched alongside one another from the red base band of a lot of Polish flags.

Wilska argues for Ciba’s purpose as a important determine in Polish artwork in the 1980s, pointing to her participation in big team reveals in Warsaw that encapsulated an emphatic flip to painting throughout that decade. When a lot of friends channeled collective exhaustion with both of those the language of the avant-garde and a restrictive socialist routine into expressive, generally absurd figuration akin to the Neue Wilde, Ciba worked in escalating isolation and cultivated a somewhat exclusive pared-down and abstracted symbology. As rarely any of Ciba’s do the job exists these days (a pair of doodles gifted to a close friend and exhibited in this article bear small resemblance to her portray), the virtually vacant exhibition asserts Ciba’s existence by building her absence material. The get the job done of preserving archives, to which the Arton Foundation is focused, in some cases has less to do with filling in gaps than insisting on the holes that unsettle canonized variations of art background.

— Camila McHugh