Artists of the week from Poland - in pictures

Paulina Olowska’s 2010 series Applied Fantastic – featuring Woolmark (above) – is based on knitting pattern cards, which keep a distinct flavour of the eastern bloc while looking towards western fashion trends
Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

Olowska uncovers an alternative history of pop culture in Poland’s communist past – as in Klaun
Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

Olowska works in collage, video, neon and painting to probe and interpret – as in Cardigan Smrek – the localised recreation of western styles
Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

Anna Molska's political video from 2008, W=F*s (Work), shows a gang of men building a structure on bleak Berlin scrubland. It alludes to the legacy of an idealised communism that wished to use art to improve the world Photograph: courtesy Foksal Gallery Foundation

Molska's 2009 film The Weavers is based on Nobel prize-winning writer Gerhart Hauptmann’s play about an 1844 revolution among textile workers Photograph: Courtesy of Broadway 1602, New York

In the film, Molska portrays coal-miners in Silesia, an industrialised region of Poland where workers are threatened by new fuel sources and technology Photograph: Courtesy of Broadway 1602, New York

Set to a powerfully sombre soundtrack, The Weavers contrasts the textile workers’ revolt with the modern-day closure of the coal mine, a life-changing event that met with no resistance from the politically disenfranchised labour force Photograph: Courtesy of Broadway 1602, New York

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s paintings call to mind the death heads of James Ensor and the existential angst in the cartoon-like works of Philip Guston
Photograph: Courtesy of Foksal Gallery Foundation

These works depict a hallucinogenic world of Ziolkowski’s own devising, by turns ribald and horrific, where flesh falls from bones and eyes sprout in strange places
Photograph: Courtesy of Foksal Gallery Foundation

Ziolkowski’s work sits outside the conceptual concerns of contemporary painting. His personal vision of existential horror is said to be influenced by his childhood in Zamość, a remote town overshadowed by the memory of Nazi war crimes
Photograph: Courtesy of Foksal Gallery Foundation