ARCHIVE EXHIBITION

ALL EYES ON ME / EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS BY AGNIESZKA SANDOMIERZ

Artist: Agnieszka Sandomierz

Venue: 101 Projekt Gallery, Nowy Świat 53

Date: 02.03.- 20.03.2015

Against backgrounds that are plain, decorated or sometimes stained with colored spots, in raw natural colors on untreated canvas or paper, figures fill almost the entire frame - sitting on an armchair or squatting, perhaps limply collapsing, or levitating. Some are represented as only the upper part of the body, others to the waist – these are the synthetic and expressive psychological portraits of the artist, sometimes complemented by characters from her personal environment (children, husband, dogs), or by references from everyday life (furniture, toys, mysterious plants) or spindly, surrealist forms.

Covering the period from 2012 to the present, the recent paintings and drawings by Agnieszka Sandomierz make up the new exhibition and continue a meandering journey through her life and work. This time, in a kind of "notebook" she analyses her spiritual and emotional states.

The painted story of her daily life has taken different forms. With sensual and eroticised images, bordering on the verge of mental exhibitionism, she entered at the end of her studies the landscape of female artists of the younger generation, working in the pop-art style, displaying herself in new roles of wife and mother.

This new exhibition consists of works made with egg tempera on canvas and tempera on paper. Shown under the common title of All eyes on me, Sandomierz once again scrutinizes and analyzes herself. However, she seems to go beyond the simple observation of her own body or the registration of banal gestures and actions. This time she ruthlessly bares her "states of mind". As once she displayed familiarity with femininity, eroticism, loneliness, and motherhood, now she examines her own mental condition.

The figure of the artist is shown in a slanting attitude, or in a serpentine pose (Insomnia, 2014; Falling, 2012); another time it is as if she were floating in space without gravity (Self-portrait with Michalina, 2012), or for a moment might find herself next to herself. Sometimes the figure is cut off from her environment, sometimes it is found amidst the hustle and bustle of everyday life, or even hiding - like an oversized baby in yellow trainers - in a mysterious garden (All eyes on me, 2014). Canvases are mostly in cool blue tones. Colour is used to emphasize an additional frozen state, a sense of suspension, of melancholy, of "remaining in oblivion."

The main character of the works on paper is a psychedelic little girl with mature facial features, who is spitting out spindly elements that form part of the design of the environment. The portraits are drawn with only a few powerfully relevant lines, infantile costumes but also with gestures or moods. Sometimes the figure is reduced only to the head placed together with a fragment of an internal organ such as the heart, or sometimes it merges into the ornamental background.

Works on paper are dominated by red contrasted with black lines or stains and the natural creamy-white background of cardboard. The colors highlight the the rapacity of the drawings. Most of the scenes are located in a surreal, deeply worrying reality. They are painted with a confident line that looks as if it was created at a single stroke, a blunt approach that works very effectively. We can feel the presence of the artist carefully watching herself but there is also a provocation to delve deeper into the next stage of her work.

Magdalena Durda-Dmitruk

Agnieszka Sandomierz (born 1978)

She studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Painting in 1998-2003. She received her diploma with honors in 2003 at the atelier of Professor Wiesław Szamborski, completing an appendix on wall painting under the supervision of Professor Edward Tarkowski. Between 2005-2012 she was an assistant at the Faculty of Painting in Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2005 she received a scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and Art. Since completing her studies she has helped create a unique atmosphere in the studio at 11 Listopada Street 22 in the Prague District of Warsaw.

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