Piotr Uklański: The Nazis
9 May - 29 November 2026 Vermont
  • Piotr Uklański, The Nazis, 1998 [detail]. © the Artist

  • In the large-scale photographic installation The Nazis (1998), Uklański underscores a sustained and collective fascination with the Third Reich as depicted through the lens of Hollywood and production companies across Europe and South America.

  • INFORMATION

    The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce the exhibition, Piotr Uklański: The Nazis to be held in Reading, Vermont from 9 May - 29 November 2026. Working in photography, sculpture, installation, film and performance, Uklański's decades-long practice tackles complex themes including violence, sex and death, often embracing taboo topics that have been transformed through mass media consumption and pop culture. In the large-scale photographic installation The Nazis (1998), Uklański underscores a sustained and collective fascination with the Third Reich as depicted through the lens of Hollywood and production companies across Europe and South America.

  • Uklański's The Nazis is an installation comprised of 164 cropped images of actors performing in German SS clothing in productions...

    Piotr Uklański. The Nazis, 1998 [detail]

    [Robert Downey Jr. in "Rented Lips" directed by Robert Downey Sr., 1987, Vista Organization Partnership. American video cover]

    Hall Collection. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation © the Artist

     

    Uklański's The Nazis is an installation comprised of 164 cropped images of actors performing in German SS clothing in productions made between 1933 and 1998. The actors' individual performances span genres from historical dramas to comedies, classic films to cult exploitation, and long-form cinema to television episodes. The nature of the character's roles vary widely and include historical reenactments, satirical appropriation, disguised operations by Allied forces, and fictionalized adventures. Often saturated and glossy, Uklański's densely arranged series is a poignant appraisal of the film industry and its commodification of a fascist regime.

  • Uklański's reproductions vary in style, including photographic film stills, drawn illustrations commissioned for posters, pixelated promotional images, and profiles saturated...

    Piotr Uklański. The Nazis, 1998 [detail]

    [Maximilian Schell in "The Odessa File" directed by Ronald Neame, 1974, Columbia Pictures, Publicity material]

    Hall Collection. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation © the Artist

    Uklański's reproductions vary in style, including photographic film stills, drawn illustrations commissioned for posters, pixelated promotional images, and profiles saturated to abstraction. For example, images of Robert Downey Jr. in Rented Lips (1987) and Hardy Krüger in Battle of Neretva (1969) are appropriated from colorful illustrations of video covers. Alternatively, black and white photographs of Maximilian Schell in The Odessa File (1974) and Liam Neeson in Shining Through (1992) were culled from the films' publicity material. Uklański's broad reach of source material is historically captivating, ranging from video stills to publicity materials, and emphasizes the archival dedication inherent in his process.

  • Iterations of Uklański's The Nazis have been exhibited internationally at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The...

    Piotr Uklański. The Nazis, 1998 [detail]

    [Hardy Krüger in " Battle of Neretva" directed by Veljko Bulajic, 1969, Yugoslavia Film. German video cover]

    Hall Collection. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation © the Artist

     

    Iterations of Uklański's The Nazis have been exhibited internationally at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; Zachęta - National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Muzeum Susch, Susch, Switzerland; documenta 14, Kassel; The Jewish Museum, New York; Punta della Dogana, Venice; and Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen, among others.

  • Born in Warsaw in 1968, Piotr Uklański currently lives and works between Warsaw and New York. His work has been...

    Piotr Uklański. The Nazis, 1998 [detail]

    [Liam Neeson in "Shining Through" directed by David Seitzer, 1992, Twentieth Century Fox. Publicity Material. Photograph by Keith Hamshere]

    Hall Collection. Courtesy Hall Art Foundation © the Artist

     

    Born in Warsaw in 1968, Piotr Uklański currently lives and works between Warsaw and New York. His work has been exhibited globally including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Tate Modern, London, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and most recently the Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin. Uklański represented Poland at the 26th São Paulo Biennial in 2004, and has participated in the International Art Exhibition at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, the 63rd Venice International Film Festival in 2006, the 5th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2008, the 75th Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2010, documenta 14 in 2017 in Kassel and Athens, and in the 16th Istanbul Biennial in 2019. The artist's work is represented in several private and public collections, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York; Tate Modern in London; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; the Francois Pinault Foundation in Paris; among others.

     

    For more information and images, please contact the Hall Art Foundation's administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.

     

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  • Piotr Uklański, The Nazis, 1998 [detail]. © the Artist
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