At one point in Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (2009), Larry "Doc" Sportello's investigations bring him from 1970 Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where the pothead private eye spends some downtime watching television. Pynchon is known for the truths that emerge from unlikely sources in his fictions, in this case the guest on the local news that evening, a “visiting Marxist economist from one of the Warsaw Pact nations, who appeared to be in the middle of a nervous breakdown.”
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“Las Vegas,” he tried to explain, “it sits out here in middle of desert, produces no tangible goods, money flows in, money flows out, nothing is produced. This place should not, according to theory, even exist, let alone prosper as it does. I feel my whole life has been based on illusory premises. I have lost reality. Can you tell me, please, where is reality?” The interviewer looked uncomfortable and tried to change the subject to Elvis Presley.
“Inherent Vices,” is a group show presented by Her Clique featuring the work of Arman Galstyan, Monika Mamzeta, Jan Możdżyński, Aleksandra Nowicka, Ester Parasková, Gregor Rozanski, Julia Woronowicz, Amadeusz Pucek, and Katarina Janečková, all of it walking the cutting edge of aesthetics and relevance. Elvis seems to have so thoroughly departed the edifice that even his biopics are no longer about him but each of these young artists, many of them from Warsaw itself, have plenty to say about our modern day collective excesses.
The phrase “inherent vice” is best known as an actuarial term with maritime origins that refers to defects within an object or property that would preclude insurance: we can't underwrite that ship, it's clearly going down. Americans know a lot about sinking ships these days, and for a subset of us the term is inextricably linked to that curious and increasingly relevant book by our country's greatest living novelist. Inherent Vice distinguishes itself from the rest of the author's oeuvre through its readability. This emerges from his earnest engagement with the detective genre. The cover wouldn't look out of place at an airport, or dog-eared in a pile with a stack of other such books, behind a bar that serves Pina Coladas.
The exhibition begins with a similarly stylish goal, an aesthetic journey through Pynchonian territory, with each artist a station on a journey through paranoia, memory, labor, and the semi-fortunate persistence of desire.
If Pynchon’s world is one of distorted perception and the inescapable gaze of systems, Arman Galstyan (b. 1994) confronts that same weight on the most intimate level: the gaze that shapes shame and memory, erupting from unexpected surfaces, as though surveillance were embedded in the body itself.
Galstyan adopts a Surrealist approach to explore darker emotions tied to difficult childhood experiences and to feeling marginalized due to his Armenian heritage. In his oil paintings, eyes frequently stare out eerily and enigmatically — from women’s breasts or men’s footwear — a representation of how deeply we are shaped by the way we see ourselves. Galstyan’s work confronts the weight of this inescapable gaze and the distortions of our shame-filled self-perceptions.
In a show haunted by the specter of lost utopias, Galstyan’s surreal visions feel pulled from one of Doc's acid trips, but the work of Monika Mamzeta (b. 1972) brings us back to the real world, speaking to Pynchon’s recurrent theme of cultural spectacle and decay, reminding us of the violent interventions visited on bodies and symbols.
The wilted flowers in her video in this show, Change of Life (2024), recall how dreams collapse under external pressures masked as biological change. Mamzeta is seen in a cream suit interacting with a profusion of vivid magenta peonies. From between her legs the blossoms wilt, lose color, and are sapped of their essence; their petals are ripped, bruised, and devoured. The drastic ways in which the flowers are handled and spent suggest that the trajectory of a woman’s experience is not always guided by natural forces.
Her delicate handling of the materials and ideas are reflective of her studies in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and her doctorate from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Now a patent attorney and feminist artist who works in the mediums of video, photography, and installation, she could almost be a character in Inherent Vice, for the way she sits at the intersection of bureaucracy and counterculture.
But what would Pynchon be without paranoia? Doc's is entirely appropriate, given all the cannabis in Inherent Vice, and anyway he's ensnared in the web of intrigues typical for detective stories. At this point we must bring up The Big Lebowski (1998) as a point of comparison. Doc doesn't bumble his way through the plot, the way Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski does. It's more that he glides through it, arriving exactly where he needs to be for the next clue to descend upon him.
A show by Jan Możdżyński (b. 1986) in London this year used lyrics from the Big Lebowski soundtrack as titles, which is appropriate for the comedic paranoia that runs through his work. His exuberant color and fluid identities resonate with Pynchon’s carnivalesque tones, too, where boundaries blur and sexuality becomes both liberation and cage.
Where Mamzeta dissects the violence done to bodies and symbols, Możdżyński’s joyous disruptions recall the way Pynchon treats sexuality as a way of shattering consensus reality. Możdżyński’s art is concerned with dispelling the stigma attached to sexual minorities and disintegrating traditional conceptions of male and female identity. Through freewheeling flights of fancy, he exalts the pleasures of diverse sexual preferences and elevates the visibility of the sexually marginalized.
The excavations of memory by Aleksandra Nowicka’s (b. 1997) call to mind Pynchon’s obsession with haunted pasts — the way photographs can hold ghosts that intrude on the present, destabilizing what we think of as history.
Her paintings possess a vintage quality, often recreating the overexposed lighting of a camera flash. Her reconstructions of old family photos are a means of revisiting her childhood experiences at the turn of the century.
By introducing supernatural elements, she excavates ghosts of the past that might continue to haunt the present in the form of warped beliefs or lasting traumas. Like the tropical postcard sent to Doc by his ex-girlfriend, reminding them of the time they were fooled by prankster spirits unleashed through a Ouija board.
Nowicka's depictions of domestic interiors also conjure social memory, perhaps a collective sense of nostalgia and Polishness that resonates across her body of work. In this way, she questions the role of objects and photographs in the process of remembering and discovering one’s identity.
Moving from the interior to the exterior, Gregor Rozanski (b. 1988) takes us into sonic and urban spaces that echo Pynchon’s fascination with subcultures, with underground channels of communication that operate alongside official narratives like the secret alternate postal service in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), producing altered states and collective hallucinations.
Rozanski's practice — which spans sound, video, sculpture, and installation — addresses sociopolitical themes through the lenses of club culture, hauntology, and urban transformation. Currently, his research focuses on the premodern underground, post-work society, urban decay, and timeless mythologies.
As a noise musician and rave DJ, he is fascinated by how sound evokes altered states and cultural memory. His video piece Blue (#3B5998) (2012) reworked Derek Jarman’s avant-garde film of the same name from 1993, editing its narration into a commentary on the chaos and visual overload of the internet age. Rozanski's works have been exhibited at Tate Modern in London, the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
The attention to labor and repetition seen in the work of Ester Parasková (b. 1993) mirrors Pynchon’s dark humor about industry and consumption — the way systems grind individuals into patterns, and how within those repetitions one might still glimpse a strange beauty or absurdity.
Born in a small town in Moravia, Czech Republic, Ester Parasková left home at 18 and discovered a love for the arts in the city of Brno. She later moved to Prague and enrolled at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM), where she currently pursues a Master of Arts in painting.
Parasková’s expressive abstract style of painting is less interested in the final aesthetic than in capturing a particular mental state through color and gesture. She balances bold, spontaneous brushstrokes with intricate, precise drawings — creating a dialogue between chaos and order. Her creative process is influenced by the physical environment, with dust, footprints, and pigments in the studio forming an integral part of her canvases.
Stemming from a stint at an automotive factory in her youth, labor is a prominent theme that arises in her work, expressed through the ideas of mechanical repetition and erosion of individual authorship. In recent works, she deconstructs familiar cultural imagery, particularly the iconography of Disney animation. By fragmenting and abstracting these figures, she shifts the focus from polished sheen of mass-produced consumer visuals to the unseen labor behind them.
The mythologies and alternative histories of Julia Woronowicz (b. 1997) map onto Pynchon’s playful counter-histories, where folklore and conspiracy fuse into speculative memory, undermining the authority of a single master narrative. Her work chronicles alternative realities to challenge dominant versions of history defined by the male perspective.
Her paintings and objects are expansive, reaching both into the ancient past and into the amorphous future. They cover Polish mythology, regional history, and personal narratives, shaping new archetypes that are feminine, queer, botanical, animalistic, even object- or phenomenon-oriented. Per Woronowicz's artist's statement these stories are “sometimes documented, sometimes overheard, and sometimes entirely imagined.” She makes lo-fi electropop too, as a singer under the pseudonym Pola Nuda.
Pop music and alternate histories are hard to escape when one thinks about California in 1970, because it was with Charles Manson that the dream of the 1960s died. Inherent Vice was published in the throes of the mortgage crisis and Barack Obama's bank bailout, when a very different kind of dream ended. Now America spirals downward in a fall free from consequence or sanity.
Warsaw-based Amadeusz Pucek (b. 1986) paints the people, objects and landscapes that surround him. An open box of matches. A nude woman in a bathtub. The interior of a bus. A view of the Vistula river from a bridge. Vegetables on a cutting board, before they are turned into broth. In capturing these moments vividly, it is as if he is trying to make the bold assertion that reality does in fact exist.
“The motifs recurring across my canvases are what I live in and what I look at. There’s nothing extraordinary about them,” he says. “I sometimes feel as though I don’t choose the motif at all. The motif chooses itself.” These ordinary subjects create a shared world and ground for conversation, allowing the viewer to weave in their own stories and associations and to “experience fleeting moments of resonance.”
Pucek ascribes equal weight to observation as he does to recording. Escaping the contemporary culture of immediacy and superficiality, he observes his surroundings with mindfulness and makes notes and sketches, searching for a deeper essence in the seemingly mundane. His canvases are prepared in a traditional manner, using nails, bone glue, impasto and heavy paint without any solvent. In his oil paintings he applies visible gestures, with big stains of colour putting on layer after layer. Pucek believes beauty transcends aesthetic categories or even the visible. Instead, it is a universal experience linked to notions of closeness, uniqueness, and goodness.
But vices are plentiful across Inherent, as they are in Pynchon's other works. Gravity's Rainbow (1973) proposes that the Nazis conquered America's corporate boardrooms through S&M sex, and the heroes of Mason & Dixon (1997) get high with George Washington.
No artist throws herself into bodily excesses with more enthusiasm than the final artist in this show, Katarina Janečková (b. 1988). Janečková is a multimedia artist who employs paper, canvas, bedsheets, and a wide array of markmaking tools to explore complexities of the female experience, portraying her own sexuality and motherhood as characters. Born in Bratislava, Slovakia, she earned a Master of Arts in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, and is now based in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Playa Herradura, Costa Rica.
Katarina Janečková’s intimate and maternal perspectives speak to a dimension often shadowed in Pynchon but nonetheless present: the fragile dream of a world reordered around care, where even chaos and interruption might be a generative force.
Her work addresses social justice and critiques conventional notions of gender norms, social progress, nationalist pride, and age-appropriate behaviors. As she ponders the evolving contours of her motherhood, she imagines a world where societies prioritize the health and security of women, and where humans nurture one another as a mother does her child.
Janečková’s process is improvisational and has increasingly incorporated contributions by her two young daughters. She often works with the canvas laid flat on the floor, which enables her children to walk on or mark its surface. These markings embrace the chaotic aspects of motherhood and make room for the next generation’s potential to inspire positive change.
Taken together, the artists of “Inherent Vices” extend Pynchon’s restless inquiry into systems, dreams, and failures. Just as Doc Sportello drifts through conspiracies that never fully resolve, visitors are invited to wander through works that resist singular interpretation. Each contribution exposes a fracture: the unseen labor beneath surfaces, the ghosts that infiltrate memory, the joys that subvert normativity, the care that pushes against collapse. If Pynchon’s novel staged the end of one American dream in the haze of another, this exhibition suggests that such endings are never final. Instead, in every crack and distortion, a possibility remains — fragile, flickering, but undeniable — that art might still show us where reality hides.
Text written by Dan Duray