Fool Disclosure

Museum Cobra presents Pat Oleszko: Fool Disclosure, the first solo exhibition in Europe of American artist and performer Pat Oleszko. The exhibition will open during Amsterdam Art Week, and brings together sculpture, performance, costume, film, and political commentary in an exuberant world where humor and imagination undermine every form of authority.

For more than fifty years, Oleszko has been using her body and public space as artistic material. Building on her early performances, she went on to create extravagant costumes and monumental inflatable sculptures that literally take to the streets, the stage and the audience. As Oleszko herself puts it, at a certain point her art simply ‘walked out the door’, with the whole world as its playground.

Central to Fool Disclosure are her spectacular inflatables, which became a key part of her practice from the 1980s onwards. Works such as Blowhilda (1980), Big Pussy (1989), The Domino Effect (1990) and the later Deportment of Corrections (2007) combine absurdity and visual spectacle with incisive reflections on politics, war, gender and power. Costumes, films, photographs and archive material also reveal how, throughout her career, Oleszko created an ever-changing parade of characters: grotesque, seductive, rebellious and often strikingly present in public spaces.

Fool Disclosure introduces performance art as a new programme line at Museum Cobra, in which the museum creates space for art that manifests itself not only as an object, but also through the body, over time and in direct relation to the audience. Oleszko’s radical freedom, humour and refusal to conform to existing categories are, at the same time, in line with an idea that has been central to Cobra from the outset: art as a living, experimental and disruptive force.

The exhibition was developed by SculptureCenter in New York, where Oleszko’s first institutional solo exhibition in New York in over 35 years was held in 2026.