Artist: Agata Bogacka

Title: Demonstration of Pictures

Venue: Pola Magnetyczn, Warsaw

Part of the Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2020.

For two years now, Agata Bogacka’s painting has taken a decidedly abstract direction, completely abandoning both figuration and anthropomorphic elements that were concisely present in her work until the opening of the artist’s previous exhibition at Pola Magnetyczne gallery (Relationship, 2018). The bodies of individuals entangled in social structures have already left the canvas scene for good, leaving behind the painting structure itself, a network of complex relations between geometric figures, layers of paint, colour planes and interpenetrating gradients. A series of eloquent painting titles – Negotiations, Relationship, Dependency, Opposition, Reconstruction, Head in the Clouds, Divided View, Unfinished View, Promises, Wishes, Expectations, Roots, Awakening or Equality Dream – show that the place from which the artist speaks today is situated on the line of balance that each of us should constantly build towards others or towards the world around us. The title of Agata Bogacka’s exhibition, Demonstration of Pictures, refers to a painting by Henryk Streng (later Marek Włodarski), which was created in the significant year of 1933. In her large canvases, as though they were banners (which, however, cannot be lifted, unlike in Włodarski’s case), and in her videos, the artist manifests the opaque nature of the world we find ourselves in today: dangerous radicalisation of political discourse, growing polarisation and antagonisation of social groups on religious or moral grounds in the times of the economic and epidemiological crisis of the early 2020s.