“Raster Haircut” is the first presentation in New York City of the Warsaw-based Raster Gallery, one of the most influential contemporary art galleries in Poland. As the curators explain: “In contradiction to the Polish saying, “Don’t split hairs in four”, the exhibition is composed of works by four artists: Rafal Bujnowski, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Przemek Matecki and Jan Smaga. Most of them are most recent works, created or selected especially for this exhibition.

The exhibition does not have a subject – instead it has a main motif: hair. Hair as a characteristic, organic structure (often difficult to disentangle!), but also hair as a coiffure, a stylized form, a carefully designed shape, and also a sign of identity. “Raster Haircut”, though, is not a proposal of yet another style or fashion, but rather an attempt to describe our artistic identity. “Raster Haircut” is not only a specific “hair-do”, but above all it is our special way of seeing, which sometimes requires respectfully stooping down to examine every single “hair”, whatever seems marginal and petty, and which at first glance is not always visible, even though – as with hair – we live with it every day. Thus “Raster Haircut” is simply a hair stylist’s mirror, in which, as on the palm of the hand, one sees an unfolding process: sense slowly emerging from chaos, the promise of a new order.”

Raster Gallery, which has been run since 2001 by curators and critics Lukasz Gorczyca and Michal Kaczynski, presents the best of the country’s emerging young artists, and some from abroad.