The solo show of Agata Nowosielska features several dozen paintings and collages from recent years alongside her major early works (some of them arranged into painting installations). In her painting, the artist strives to “depict the whole spectacle of life, both its deadly serious aspects and the playful ones.” Opera Bizarre is a capacious collection of baroque or quasi-camp absurdity, grotesque, pomposity and – simultaneously – minimalism. What is bizarre and whimsical is not so much amusing as disturbing, and what seems past becomes grimly present.
Nowosielska’s intertextual art combines multi-threaded film and literary references, the cacophony of childhood-related topics or memories, the ghastly ridiculousness of the pathos of modernity and the randomness of the world’s phenomena. The collage aesthetics points to the excess, so adequate to capture the spirit of the times of profusion, in which many orders – be it mental, political or social ones – tend to make an appearance of a rapidly disintegrating system, while the post-irony of human attitudes quickly turns into a farce of anachronistic ambitions, fearfully pushing away the tragedy of itself.
Agata Nowosielska’s painting, full of frivolity and humour, addresses the viewer in an indirect but brave manner – openly and entirely seriously: “What the practice of art means for me. I will always have a hunger for painting. I will always have a room of my own as asserted by Virginia Woolf. I will always have my space for art, even if there is nothing left to paint on or with.”
Agata Nowosielska (born 1982) – painter, curator, author of critical texts. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, studied at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen and completed Postgraduate Museum Curatorial Studies at the Jagiellonian University. Curator with Galeria Żak in Gdańsk. Nowosielska’s previous solo exhibitions were showcased at CSW Łaźnia in Gdańsk, BWA in Zielona Góra, Projektrum Hjaerne in Helsingborg. Her works are held in a number of public and private collections. Recipient of many awards, including Bremerkunststipendium, Polish Culture Worldwide Scholarship, Splendor Gedanensis Award in Gdańsk. The artist is affiliated with Stolarska/Krupowicz Gallery in Warsaw.
