Artnose Artists

 Jaçek Lada

 Born Mrongovo, Poland, 1949, Died Gdansk 1999. 
 Studied Warsaw Technical Arts Academy, 1969-74

       Jaçek Lada

Lada (left) is perhaps best known as founder of the 'Pest' group of East European artist-agitators during the mid-1970s, that included Georgi Mistrovic, Tento Brestigova and Jόsef 'DoDo' Pagany. 

He started his career as a professional body-builder and porn star before turning to politics and art. Widely credited with having started the food price riots in opposition to the Gierek regime, the Pests, as they were known, argued that money is unrelated to economic value and called for new regulative principles to govern the dialectic of industrial production.

Lada, whose father Ernst had been close to the main protagonists of the Frankfurt School for Social Research between the wars, was also a vocal opponent of Josef Beuys, whom Lada accused of manufacturing a mythical autobiography to suit his own bourgeois ambitions and to promote his spurious 'Big Dialog'. 

In order to give voice to this position, in 1978 Lada and associates spent three weeks in a single room dressed in husky fur, eating nothing but industrial fat, a gesture which ultimately splintered the group, Pagany falling ill soon after, dying in an asylum in Mazuria in 1980.

Artnose owns the exclusive copyright to Lada's art and writings and, as sole executor, steers the Lada estate.

Artnose Artists - Quick Links

  Yuk Foo & Fuk Yoo
  Jaçek Lada
  Wim Waals
  Euan Mee
  Pixel Popadopoulos
  Diego Vasquez
  Juan Peccadiño (The Barber of Solihull)
  Mimmo Gulbenkian

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