Olkusz | Kinga Nowak

Artist

Kinga Nowak

ABOUT EXHIBITION

The concept of the young artist’s exhibition from Krakow is based on recalling the past, specific mood, remembered events and situations. It is also an attempt to deal with this past, reconcile with passing time, leave and the emptiness that remains. Kinga Nowak creates a painting story, very suggestive and nostalgic. The current exhibition is a show of several oil paintings, portraits of closest people, inherently associated by the artist with childhood. But it’s also a look at yourself from that time, an attempt to analyze who she would be today if it were not for years spent in this particular place, home, among these people. The starting point determining the form of Kinga Nowak’s paintings is the picture. Photographic literality excludes the expressive stylization and geometrization that appeared in her earlier works. Perfect mastering of the traditional painting technique allows the artist to create realistic, spatial representations with a compact composition. In addition to subtle tonal transitions, they use strong color and light-shadow contrasts. The smoothed texture of images (similar to the photographic surfaces of positives) further “neutralizes” the form. It has to become so “transparent” again that it does not disturb the accurately constructed illusion of the actual presence of sunlit figures. The restriction of the presentation imposed on the artist to a few images imposed by the artist is another step forcing concentration, intensifying the pronunciation of the work and existing relations between them. The sharpness of light, glances and memories turns out to be the same here.

The artist talks about the pictures that make up this presentation:
“Olkusz is an exhibition whose theme is the past, the period of my childhood. I spent the first years of my life in Olkusz. I lived with my grandmother in an old house with a garden. Olkusz is a grandmother, a yard, a bench in front of the house in the sun, puddles after rain, summer, family holidays, a place that I often idealize and return to. I am invoking this world anew: people, the atmosphere of that place and time that has passed, which I miss, and which has only been left in my memory. In the pictures I show myself in relation to my grandmother, father, older cousin. These paintings are a return to childhood, but they also arose from the desire to close and “exceed” that time. I go back to the past because I find the source of who I am today. The place where I lived, the people with whom I was tied, family relationships, forms of education, are for me a kind of key and trail. Looking at them, I try to better understand my problems today. I return to “Olkusz” because it allows me to come to terms with his departure.