Paulina Olowska, Caroline Walker, Adéla Janská: Za Pultem (Behind the Counter)at Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc
Women at Work, Framed and Observed
Artists
Paulina Olowska
Caroline Walker
Adéla Janská
Author of the conception
Paulina Olowska
Production team
Erika Kovačičová
Mira Macík
Hana Kozáková
Viktoriia Semenska
Venue
Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc
Dates
November 20, 2025 – February 19, 2026
Photography
Installation views: Matěj Doležel
Opening documentation: Vendula Burgrová
Caroline Walker · Paulina Olowska · Adéla Janská · Behind the Counter (Za Pultem)
The exhibition unfolds as a constructed environment rather than a sequence of individual works. Paintings hang suspended in space, interrupted by piles of industrial scrap, stainless steel fragments, counters and screens.
The gallery is not neutral. It operates as a workplace, a showroom, a backroom. Movement through the space mirrors patterns of labour, observation and routine.
The paintings do not illustrate history. They reactivate it through atmosphere and gesture.
At the centre is the figure of the woman in public-facing roles. Not heroic, not abstracted, but positioned. Behind counters, inside shops, within interiors shaped by service, expectation and repetition.
The exhibition draws on visual codes associated with socialist modernity and its afterlives, where emancipation was staged yet tightly framed. Visibility here is never neutral. It is conditional, performative, measured.
The paintings do not illustrate history. They reactivate it through atmosphere and gesture. Familiar scenes, shop interiors, moments of pause, work in progress, are placed into a scenography that fractures time. Domestic and commercial spaces overlap. Intimacy and exposure coexist. The viewer is invited to shift roles, customer, passer-by, worker, observer, without settling into one position.
Material choices reinforce this tension. Scrap metal and industrial elements echo systems of production, while the paintings carry psychological weight. Faces meet the gaze or withdraw from it. The counter becomes a threshold rather than a boundary, a site where labour, desire and representation intersect.
Paulina Olowska, Caroline Walker, Adéla Janská, exhibition view from Za Pultem (Behind the Counter), Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc. Photography: Matěj Doležel - Image courtesy and provided by the gallery
During the opening of Za Pultem (Behind the Counter), featuring works by Paulina Olowska, Caroline Walker, and Adéla Janská, Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc. Vendula Burgrová - Image courtesy and provided by the gallery
Installation detail from Za Pultem (Behind the Counter), Telegraph Gallery, Olomouc. Photography: Matěj Doležel - Image courtesy and provided by the gallery
Rather than resolving these images into a statement, the exhibition holds them in suspension. It treats painting as a carrier of memory and labour as a choreography of gestures learned and repeated. What emerges is not nostalgia, but a controlled friction between past visual regimes and contemporary presence.
Artists and Telegraph Gallery , Olomouc on Instagram
Paulina Olowska
Caroline Walker
Adéla Janská
Dominique Catherina Foertig
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