Katarzyna Karpowicz: Essays
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The Nearness of Miniatures
The miniature is a ruse – it relieves some of the responsibility, makes the composition of the painting easier, but in return, it offers intimacy.
It works both ways – it shortens the distance, since it is like a whisper, and it diminishes responsibility, since it’s so very, very small...
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Fiery
I’m going to see Kasia, I said, and I put on a red jumper. I left the black one, freshly laundered, on a chair. Leaving the house, I stopped between the holly and the rowan. When I got there, to the old house in the centre of Krakow, a house build around internal workshops, Kasia came downstairs to get me. So I wouldn’t get lost.
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Katarzyna’s Memorial Book
A kind of symbolic and almost unreal Jewish town, probably located somewhere in eastern Europe, appears in the paintings. It could be Marc Chagall’s Liozna, Bruno Schulz’s Drohobych, or even Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Leoncin. However, I know that this is Szczebrzeszyn.
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Tales of the Shtetl
My uncle Meyer, a man of artistic talent and a known lover of several women, was ready to be wed. His was to be an arranged marriage to an 18-year-old beauty, Zipporah, from the city of Chełm. He had met her a few times, and then told stories of how wonderful and independent she was.
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Stop-frames of Sensitivity
I think I first saw Katarzyna Karpowicz’s paintings in 2015. A friend sent me a link to her portfolio at the time with an almost banal, standard question: ‘What do you think?
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Eclipses
They meet under a sky so menacing that there is no doubt that it foretells extinction, it is a sky of apocalypse, a sky of the end of the world, an inevitable sky.
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A physician’s viewpoint
I remember that when I was a medicine student, my classmates and I dissected a human limb: I carefully separated skin from tissue with a scalpel to reveal a nerve, a vein or an artery. I took out a human heart from a container and carried it in my hands like a dead nestling.
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Silver
The electric scalpel slid gently over the girl’s back. Even with a local anaesthetic, the patient would feel the cut as nothing more than a caress. But now, she was in a deep sleep. She had to be so they could do what they wanted.
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Woman-Bull
They told me – forget your tears, you have a son, a beautiful torero. He’s beautiful, he’s strong, they said as he passed from hand to hand.
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Film
I know how it looks. A young woman, sitting at a restaurant table. Too young to sit in a restaurant alone. Probably waiting for someone. Yes, I’m waiting.
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Bathtime with Blake
Among my many quirks, the most important is that I always took baths with William Blake. As far as the works I chose are concerned, it varied. Most often, I think, it was Milton. Milton was pure art, literally.
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Thoughtfulness
Thoughtfulness is the essence of these paintings. All people, animals, and even objects seem to be thoughtful and dreamy. It’s not tiredness or laziness, but playing with time that is realistically unrealistic.
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I had a dream
I dreamt about a wild animal and it’s hard to say if it is good or evil. It is both, unpredictable. So far it’s been calm, it’s let me snuggle in its warm side and it’s lulled me to sleep with its peaceful, rhythmic breath. It’s been rocking and soothing me like that for quite a while. For years.
