Łukasz Twarkowski’s Greek debut

A monumental spectacle of an experience on the border between theater, film, and video art by Poland’s leading contemporary director Łukasz Twarkowski, making his Greek debut with an iconoclastic performance that dives deep into the abyss that is contemporary art and centers on the strange individual that was the expressionist artist Mark Rothko.

A Chinese restaurant, with hanging lanterns and cooks standing over pans of noodles, an all-white New York gallery with neon signs, the messily unmade double bed of an artist from Latvia who would go on to change the course of contemporary art history, and three giant screens on the Onassis Stegi Main Stage. This setting – a cross between a film set and a video art project flooded with loud, atmospheric beats – is to be inhabited by famous painters and Chinese cooks, gallerists, art dealers and forgers, patrons of the art world and food delivery drivers.

At the heart of it all is the true story of an art forgery: a painting by the pioneering abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko, which sold for the astronomical sum of 8.5 million dollars. As it turns out, the painting was a forgery, making the affair one of the most scandalous instances of fraud in contemporary art history.

Can a forged painting still move you?

What do originals matter in a time of NFTs and blockchains?

Who decides the value of a work of art?

How free is an artist?

What is art, at the end of the day?

What does art matter – what does life itself matter – now that virtual realities exist?

A series of such questions are threaded through this four-hour performance by the up-and-coming European director Łukasz Twarkowski, appearing in Greece for the first time to present and epic, masterful, and singular story about our troubled times.

Note the misspelling of Rothko’s name in this work’s title. This is not a typo but rather a deliberate distortion contrived by the creators of the show to comment on the booming trade in counterfeit goods imitating famous labels under such names as Adibas and Dolce Banana.

• Born in present-day Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire), Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz – the son of a Marxist pharmacist who had emigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century – was forced to cut the Jewish suffix from his name in 1938 when he was made an American citizen. Hitler’s rise to power and the surge of antisemitism that culminated in the Second World War meant he had to “hide” behind the name Mark Rothko.
• Twarkowski’s inspiration for this production was the book “Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese” by the South Korean-born philosophy professor Byung-Chul Han, who is widely read in Europe. The term “shanzhai” is a Chinese neologism that means “fake”, originally coined to describe knock-off cell phones marketed under such names as Nokir (in place of Nokia) and Samsing (in place of Samsung). These cell phones were not crude forgeries but rather as good as or better than the originals. This practice, which spread across China and was applied to thousands of products, reproduces the Chinese philosophy that an original material or product is destined to be deconstructed and transformed over time. In the West, this is seen simply as “piracy”.
• The legendary Knoedler art dealership in New York closed in 2011. This was brought about by one of the biggest art world scandals in modern American history that saw the gallery’s president, Ann Freedman, put more than 30 fake paintings attributed to famous abstract expressionists (Pollock, Rothko, and Motherwell) on sale over a period of 15 years. It turned out these paintings were the work of the painter and mathematician Pen-Shen Qian from Queens, New York. This forgery scandal was chronicled in the Netflix documentary “Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art”, which streamed on the platform in the winter of 2021 following screenings at various film festivals.

• Rothko’s Seagram murals – a famous series of works that were his first to experiment with a dark palette – were originally commissioned for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City’s Seagram Building. After visiting the restaurant, Rothko changed his mind about the commission, returned his large cash advance, and withdrew the works. Almost a decade later, in late February 1970, he sent these paintings to the Tate Gallery in London as a donation. In a tragic, ironic twist, on the very day the works arrived in London – his health poor due to his harmful habits and an aortic aneurysm, and his marriage on the rocks – he was found dead inside his Manhattan studio. His suicide could be construed as his final work: lying half naked in front of a sink where he’d left the tap running, the water overflowing onto the floor to mingle with his blood that had sprung copiously from the artery in his arm he’d slashed using a razor blade, the scene was clearly reminiscent of his blood-red works. He was 66.
• Since making his debut back in 2011, the 39-year-old Łukasz Twarkowski has sought to combine the performing and visual arts with multimedia. 2013 saw him direct “Akropolis”, based on the work by Stanisław Wyspiański, which caught the attention of audiences and critics alike. His last two directorial works – “Lokis” (2017) and “Respublika” (2020) – garnered acclaim in Poland and launched his reputation across Europe. He also has a longstanding artistic partnership with the legendary Polish director Krystian Lupa.

It seems critics have also been raving about Twarkowski’s latest work, “Rohtko”. In the Polish press, Dorian Widawski writes in Magazyn Szum (Noise Magazine): “It’s hard to go beyond saying this is a spectacular show, a great production, and a new quality. These are perhaps simple and yet too big words, but still I feel that they are not enough.” Meanwhile, Michał Krawczyk concludes his review of the production in Przegląd Bałtycki (The Baltic Review) as follows: “This performance will open your eyes wide to craving adventures resistant to oblivion. A dark reflection on the business-like nature of contemporary art and a dramatic recollection of the figure of Mark Rothko have been dissected in a readable and inspiring manner.”