Rohtko

In 2004, a painting by Mark Rothko was sold by a famous New York gallery to collectors, a couple, for more than eight million dollars. Seven years later, it was discovered that it was a fake — a "Rohtko." It was a Chinese artist, a math teacher from Queens, who had painted it in his garage, along with a few other paintings from Pollock and De Kooning. Starting from what became a huge counterfeit scandal, the Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski, a close collaborator of Krystian Lupa, created a total show that starts in the 1960s and goes through the last years of his life before arriving at the recent forms of digital art and crypto-art. His spectacular staging, created with Polish, Latvian and Chinese actors, brings visual arts and video onto the stage to question the merchandising of contemporary art and the myth of authenticity. What determines the value of a work of art: artists, gallery owners, influencers, experts, the art market? Through a powerful sensory journey, Rohtko shuffles the cards of the art world, and beyond it, of the things we are ready to give value to.