PRETTY FLOWERS / Bogna Gniazdowska

Artist: Bogna Gniazdowska

Curator: Magdalena Kąkolewska

Place: Galeria 101 Projekt

Date: 22.10 - 29.10.2020

"Pretty flowers" is a collection of almost 100 paintings and drawings that have been created every day this year, actually by the way ... it is the fruit of efforts, self-discipline, and an attempt to deal with myself. It is also a painterly record of conversations, a confrontation and an attempt of friendship in new circumstances ...

On March 13, 2020, the opening of the exhibition - "Bogna-Florentyna" was planned. The subject was supposed to be similar - flowers, because for more or less five years I have been working on a series of works called "bogna / florentine", "bo / flo" for short, devoted to nature and plants.

I have been preparing for the exhibition for a long time. The date set a year earlier allowed me to think carefully and paint the whole thing.

That was the plan.

But the plan, as it sometimes happens to plans, has changed, because in spring of 2020 the world turned upside down and changed irrevocably due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

This situation caused radical changes also in me. I have changed too. So, in order to be honest with myself and the audience, I decided that the exhibition conceived and painted before Covid-19 is no longer possible to show in its current shape. The exhibition "Bogna-Florentyna", as a faithful friend, unfortunately has to be put to the test of time. Together with Magdalena Kąkolewska, the curator of this and the previous exhibition, we decided a radical volt.

Therefore, this exhibition includes - above all - works on paper, made this year during forced, general isolation.

Paradoxically, the lockdown allowed me to focus deeper.

The inability to draw inspiration from the outside emphasized what I have inside me, it allowed me to meet the emotions that accompany me every day. This year's works are complemented, and contraire, by several earlier works, shown here for comparison and completeness.

The plants painted here were created primarily from the head, they are the essence of my observations and many years of work in the open air. Fleeting notes on paper, I repeat with oil studies on canvas, I multiply them to group them into cycles, until I try to break away from nature. All this to delve into your own feeling and seeing the world. In my painting, I still shyly, though inevitably, strive towards abstraction. Looking for a painterly way of naming the unnamed.

Bogna Gniazdowska,October 2020.

Bogna Gniazdoowska - painter and poet, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1990, in the studio of Professor Stefan Gierowski and in the studio of Professor Ryszard Winiarski. Scholarship holder of the Ministry of Culture in 1991. She has had 25 individual exhibitions, participated in over 50 collective exhibitions in Poland and abroad. She was the curator of the exhibition "Pokuszek" - the winners of the APH ERGO Hestia competition. She is the author of 3 animated films, and the film "You will not run away from it" (with Olga Wolniak), she is the author of two poetry volumes: "My choice" in 2016 and "Cherries on the handle" in 2018, published by the Conwio publishing house. She also published poems in "Kwartalnik Artystyczny". She lives in Warsaw and tries to work every day.

CATALOGUE