Interviews
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Extracting a painting
I was brought up in the atelier of Olga Boznańska. The first 12 years of my life I spent in the beautiful and large atelier at 21/7 Piłsudzkiego Street, which at Olga’s time was Wolska Street. On the one side we had the Planty Park and on the other one there was the Kościuszko Mound in the distance, surrounded by Wolski Forest.
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These terrifying female emotions
Mouth covered in blood or merely smudgy lipstick? A young artist Katarzyna Kubiak talks about her final year works in which she depicted her second nature and, as a result, created a puzzlement at her Academy in Zielona Gora. She tells us why she photographs strangers, why she is fascinated with female nature and what does Friday Kahlo and Jacek Malczewski have in common…
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Mysteries of the Picture
A struggle worth fighting, even when you stand lose. After all, how many happy painters have there been? Satisfaction? Sometimes I’ve invented a composition, it’s nicely arranged so I’m satisfied. Other times a detail works out superbly in a painting and I think – wow, this is brilliant!
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Stop the Frame (Part I)
Concentric circles with multicoloured fragments, overlapping colours, luminosity, spinning impressions and kaleidoscopic volatility – the geometric compositions of Małgorzata Jastrzębska stem from the experience of the great abstractionists of the twentieth century – Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Francis Picabia and Frantisek Kupka.
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Stop the Frame (Part II)
Paintings comfort me in a quiet way. I paint so I do not have to talk. Besides, what is there to say? Each one of them is like a copy of my own skin. I hide behind paintings. I hide in my paintings in my entirety. The only thing is that, to the painting, this does not matter.
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The World Is A Human Being
For sure, those paintings are not a direct reflection of my emotionality. In my paintings, I use this particular kind of writing, because I find any ostentation merely disgusting. Sweating one’s blood in a piece of canvas? This is not part of my world.
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Totems of the 21st Century
The surface of the canvas is a field of absolute artistic freedom and the same right should be reserved for the audience. In petroglyphs I can see a mystery, an area that has not been explored and discussed by experts. To my mind beauty also lies in variety, thus the mosaic of shapes and colours.
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The tango as an excuse (I Met a Friend)
The tango is a story that happens between two people, for a few minutes on the dance floor, and that may continue elsewhere. I’m no expert on the history of the tango and it was never my intention to paint that history. To me tango is about emotions. Either you feel them, carry them inside you, or you don’t.
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Thriller Tales from the Bible
I don’t know what they teach at the Academy, I didn’t notice. To sculpt well one must have the technique plus something to say. I studied painting and I actually paint those sculptures of mine. In each one there must be sex, a joke, and some boorishness, which is a primitive demonstration of strength.
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Permanent Sweetness
Job in advertising means living under immense pressure. If I didn’t have my creative, individual art, my comic books, my illustrations, I would probably kill someone.
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I listen to everything, anything…
Subconsciously I yearn for sunsets with their pinkish sky and sea. It’s a synonym of the greatest kitsch. Lately I have been painting a piece of sky for approximately six months. Just a bridge, a river and a sunset and yet I cannot complete it. It’s a matter of talent I guess...
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Lost In The Mirror Reflection
My girls are like Tarantino’s actresses. I do hate Tarantino, because he is ugly, cocky and boring, but he’s got good actresses. They are rough. Pretty, sexy and sweet, but each and every one of them has a gun or a knife in her pocket.
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Happiness and the chaos of the modern era
Kalina Horoń, a young abstractionist from Cracov, improves her skills and slowly takes over Vienna’s art scene. She tells Galeria Art about Austria, experimental music inspiration, the need to follow one’s intuition and party vernissages...
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I can collect my thoughts under water
Painting a man from nature and painting his essence is a completely different story. It’s not important what you see, but what you know about the person.
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Hair is my fetish
Hair is my fetish. Not all of it, actually, as I tend to remove it very scrupulously from my legs with tweezers. So this is an anti-fetish. But pubic hair and hair on the head - I could keep drawing it forever.
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There's no such thing as progress in art
Long ago I came to the conclusion that progress in art is impossible in the sense in which it exists in exact sciences, because the aims of artists in the past and today are the same.
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Big boy
I don’t like mirrors, so, I don’t paint myself. But attempting at representing yourself in paintings is something different – this is, namely, an essence of being a creative artist. However, I am not an angel. I’m certain of that!
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I come from Wloszczowa, a small town near Czestochowa
That’s because I come from Wloszczowa, a small town near Czestochowa, where if anything appeared, it really appeared: if a car passed, everyone saw it; a woman going shopping on her bicycle escaped no one’s attention, let alone a horse pulling a cart full of coal.
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I am happy to live here
The first thing that struck me here, and that I remembered after seeing my current house, was the amazing fragrance! So sweet! I thought then that it could only smell like that in paradise.
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Painting, mathematics and whodunits
I knew I wanted to be an artist from my earliest years. My father, who was related to Marcello Bacciarelli, was a good draughtsman himself and he wanted me to become a portrait painter, like the famous relative of ours. So, he would send me to a ‘painting nursery’ in the small town we lived in.
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The Marmaid
Even mermaids die young. Krahelska’s story, connected with the Mermaid monument she posed for, is a symbol of the history of Warsaw. That’s what attracts me to the mermaid - this mixture of strength, determination and deeply hidden fragility and tragedy.
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Colourful waves. Somewhere between art and a reflection of life
I do have impressionistic inclinations and I do like impressionism a lot, indeed, even though at first glance it may not be so noticeable in my paintings, since they are abstract after all.
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Shelter
I still believe in happy endings because my life is one big happy ending after disasters. I know, the world has gone crazy: we face anxiety every day because of the war in Ukraine, we are weighed down by the vision of climate catastrophe, we fear for our material existence, and yet I believe deeply, in light, I believe in art.
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Paintings are compositions
When I still painted at the academy, which I don’t do any more, I was regarded as an insane individual who paints instead of sitting and talking like everyone else. I do not consider myself particularly hard-working. When you paint, you just have to work to achieve something.
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Light needs darkness
Julia Medyńska’s studios, whether in London, New York or Międzyrzecz, always have scale and class. Large spaces, big windows, always a few paintings on the go, stacks of paint, bundles of brushes, and bottles of solvents. Pieces of carefully cut canvas, as the artist herself puts them on stretcher frames and primes them herself.
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Chillout vibes
Podkowa Leśna. An old wooden house with lots of soul… Not that big, but quite spacious. There’s enough room to house pieces of art, books, a random collection of interesting objects, records and drums. Anna Podlewska, painter, and Paweł Polit, art historian and exhibition curator, are telling us its story.
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I Paint Sweet-and-Sour Pictures
I have always liked colours that are toned down. And even though it sounds like some kind of amateur psychology, I don't like anything too strong. It's the same with sounds, music, behaviour.
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Between the station, the church and the market
Around the monastery, architecture form the awful Gierek times: the repulsive concrete cuboid shops, public toilets, ice cream booths. In the kiosks selling devotional objects – plastic figures of Our Lady lit with little light bulbs, toy guns. Here it is market day 365 days a year.
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Artistic order
Edward Dwurnik, one of the most prominent Polish painters is famous for his love of cleaning. While he washes his good paintings, those he doesn’t like end up in his dustbin, cut into small pieces.
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I have a deep respect for gravity
Generally, I don’t become attached to things, not even to my paintings. Maybe it’s because I’m a nomad like my Tartar ancestors.
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The Charm of life
Abandoned routine transformed into an affirmation of everyday life: the last sip of coffee in a coffee cup is a memory of the morning, a map – an echo of a simple stroll or perhaps a longer journey. Jola Wagner not only sees, but also perceives.
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All Saints of Bollywood
I would like to invent a devotional article that the whole world would start buying. Something that would be cheap to manufacture, something conventional and yet noble. Something like a figurine of the Mother of God. A cheap gypsum cast – a simple thing that, at the same time, is capable of conveying such intense emotions.
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A Meander
A meander – leading astray – is a labyrinth, going in circles, seeking. It is endless wandering, pushing ahead. It’s a road to one’s destination. Sometimes, it’s a road without destination. Just like life. Like painting.
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Spontaneity, a bed and paper from an antique shop
Magdalena Sawicka, a Polish artist, awarded a Grand Prix by an international jury for the uniqueness and power of her works, reflecting daily life, during the opening of an exhibition in Montrogue near Paris.
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Delectability is important to me...
My painting evolved from landscape and these hues are the result of observation of nature. Although it is far from realism, my painting emerged as a result of contact with real landscape.
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The Visible Form Of A Hidden Interior
I always wanted to find a place where, in silence, paintings could look inside their interiors. This is, I guess, the place. The one where the form occurs.
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The art of a defining moment
I am an artist. The greater the artist, the greater the sensibility. I create matter, but let us stick to the spirit. I like my collages, because I have managed to find the right formula of self-expression. They are as light as the Japan calligraphy, but they are not copies of anything. They reflect my manual dexterity and the great amount of inner work I have done.
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Picturing the joyous moments
In the beginning, there’s always a flask.
I obviously have to drink it up first. But don’t you think I would paint every single bottle I’ve emptied.
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Vertigo
In a conversation with the artist, art critic Bogusław Deptuła deconstructs her paintings, asking simple questions: what is a mirror, what is a mask, what is a circus?
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Life’s crème de la crème
Edward Dwurnik deludes and seduces. For years he’s been manipulating and playing with journalists. He provokes and astounds people with his lifestyle to such an extent that in interviews the art of painting recedes into the background, and the conversation is about success, women, money, Comme de Garcons clothes and the latest models of Mercedes.
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A contrary rebel
Martyna Merkel powerfully detaches herself from young artists who wish to shock. She stays focused on her seascapes and dutifully works on the materiality of her paintings. She tells Galeria Art about bold, for her age, artistic convictions and about waiting for artistic accidents on her canvases.
