Portraits by a young artist Agnieszka Gajewska make up an artistic statement of her interpretation of painting. She graduated from the studio of Professor Maciej Świeszewski, where she received careful education. Her early works were mature and interest in man was noticeable in them. They attempted to define mutual relations that connect people through their mutual cognition. She changed her artistic pursuit while preparing her thesis. Trying to find her own means of expression, she took the trouble to rethink her previous practice. She managed to find a subject-matter and means of expressing her interests and complexity of the painting phenomenon.
She painted portraits that represent her own generation, her schoolmates. I know her all. As a teacher, I had the pleasure of collaborating with some of them within the Studio of Basic Drawing and Painting, which I had conducted. Watching them suggests inevitable association with passing, fragmentariness, a kind of absence. Actually we are able to discuss these portaits in the past tense, as they lose their feature of a direct contact with a receiver and they become an object that calls up the past.
To be able to see Paulina, Ula, Edyta, Kasia, Honorata, Pola and Agnieszka I have to stand in a precise place, so that I can catch the very moment when every layer belongs together and I see a motionless face – one step left or right disorganises the figure presented. Through stratisfying, displacement in space Agnieszka managed to catch the motion. Her picture is not a uniform object. Comprised of numerous parts, it is a kind of displacement and thus cannot be perceived directly. It is full of melancholy, sorrow and reflection after a loss. Is it meditation over passing or over elusiveness of what is beautiful and represented by the portrayed women. Her women cry for unknown reasons. Possibly it makes them seem closer to us as they elicit a kind of compassion.
The artist looks for the title ‘sausade’ in places where it is hidden and hard to come by. Truly, youth itself is beautiful and unique, even if tragic love tends to happen. Through her endeavours Agnieszka Grajewska seems to portray the elusive and invisible. We have to hand it to her that, in her art, she is not only able to affect with what is visible in her picture-object, but also to start a discouse with painting itself. Making her works, she questions the sense of producing such large quantities of different pictures. She managed to split the reality as we perceive it and find a quality of novelty and also her own poetry in it. She also managed to broaden the field of her activity which undoubtedly gives her lots of new opportunities. 

 

prof. Krzysztof Gliszczyński

  

 

 

 

 

Agnieszka Gajewska is an extremely gifted artist who intensively and consequently tries to find her individual artistic path in drawing, painting, graphics or performance. Her collection titled ‘Sausade’ (Portuguese word for nostalgia and melancholy of the passing) seems to be the most fascinating and sensual trend of this search. The photographs of 10 women are the starting point of her paintings. The photographs are then stratisfied, like during preparation for printing, into 4 colours applied in printing: cyan, magenta, yellow and black; these are in turn painted over separate perspex plates which,when overlapped at a distance, make not only a colourful image but also an extremely sensual portrait of a woman. Gajewska’s women are crying. Split colours, along with the movement of our eyes towards the picture, come to life of magically mystic illusion, not so aesthetic as emotional.

Using plain measures, Gajewska transcends painting into the space of artistic object. In the case of works based on photography, she managed to depart from imitation and mimicry and move into the world of sublime artistic sensations.

 

dr hab. Robert FlorczakRobert Florczak