Goshka Macuga

The works of this Polish transplant to London (a 2008 Turner Prize short-lister) don't just allude to 20th-century art: They allude to the fact that so many other contemporary artists are doing the same. True dat. Macugua's current show uses as its point of departure the strange case of Miroslav Tichý, an officially banned artist in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Tichý spent 20 years between the 1960s and 1980s surreptitiously taking photos of his hometown's comely young women in various states of undress (sunbathing in bikinis, sometimes topless, in parks or at the beach), using homemade cameras built from cardboard tubing. His work represents that rare instance when dissident becomes indistinguishable from outsider artist—which may be Macuga's point. Here she presents collages, as well as a large-scale tapestry, that overlay Tichý's negatives with official Communist imagery.