BARBARA WESOLOWSKA

Born in Poland, 1984

Lives and works in London, England

Her work identifies most closely with the traditional practice of figurative painting. Through intuitive application of paint and layered surfaces she draws the viewer into a psychologically intense narrative, in conversation with this tradition, which unfolds across the paintings. The depicted figures are ambiguous and often distinguished by expressions that are in between different emotional states. Always suspended in a sort of abstract or dream-like landscape, they emerge from color stains like ghosts transforming themselves into another character. In particular, the works engage the psychological realm of attachment to the female body and how it is processed and sublimated through historically disjointed readings. The proliferation of figures staring not on the viewer but into themselves, echoes the guise of female portraiture whilst unearthing its ground. There is also a strong influence of religious iconography, to which the artist was exposed growing up in Poland. She regards the psycho-physical experience of her characters as a borrowed remorse or disillusionment with the reality of life and perhaps maturity incongruous with the buoyancy of youth. Beneath this negativity and nostalgy the artist tries to convey a complex notion of what it means to be female over the expanse of time.

GALLERIES:

East Contemporary