Katarzyna Swinarska “Love like naked death”

Katarzyna Swinarska “Love like naked death”

August 11 – September 30, 2020

Exhibition opening: August 7, 2020, 7 p.m. August 07, 2020 7 p.m.
Artist’s musical performance with participation of guitarist Michał Wojtyła aka Micky Free

Katarzyna Swinarska’s projects thoroughly explore the subject of love. The artist creates subtle series of paintings, which transport into the sphere of feelings and desires. These canvases are absorbed by nature.

The title of Katarzyna Swinarska’s latest exhibition “Love Like Death Naked” refers to Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of poor love and to the text “The Cracks of Existence” by the philosopher Jolanta Brach-Czaina, in which the author describes the experience of love as the only one, besides death, which allows one to reach “deeper layers of being”. According to this theory, and at the same time contrary to contemporary cultural trends, erotic love rises to the rank of the most important philosophical experiment which enables man to learn the essence of existence. The worldview that elevates nature, love and death to a pedestal was close to the Romantics. That is why at the exhibition “Love Like Death Naked” at the Nizio Gallery, the paintings depicting sensual plant and animal shapes transport the viewer into a Romantic reality in which lovers will not shrink from love even when it is accompanied by sister death. The flower motifs characteristic of Swinarska’s work become almost abstract. The flower – already a symbol of death in antiquity – becomes here a pretext for seeking the beauty of life in the matter of nature.

Curator of the exhibition is Karolina Kliszewska

Katarzyna Swinarska – visual artist, she works with painting and video, often in the form of docu-camera performance; she creates multimedia installations, curates exhibitions. Most of her works deal with woman’s identity. The works that have generated the most controversy have been video works dedicated to other female artists, such as: ‘Three Portraits: Nieznalska, Baumgart, Ołowska’, ‘Digressive Identity’, ‘We-Common Organism’. Swinarska always identifies herself with the subject of her interest and creates portraits of her characters from this internalized perspective, though not devoid of self-irony.
She has exhibited in the most important institutional galleries in Poland: Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk City Gallery, Wyspa Art Institute, Gdansk National Museum/Contemporary Art Branch; State Art Gallery in Sopot and galleries in London, Salzburg, Zagreb, Grodno, Marseille, Berlin, Schwerin, Brussels and Geneva.
She won the Grand Prix of the International Experimental Film Competition “In Out Festival” for her video work “Digressive Identity” (2016).
Her works can be found in institutional collections: NOMUS (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Gdansk, Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdansk, State Art Gallery in Sopot and in private collections in Poland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and the United States.

Events accompanying the exhibition:

07.08.2020 19.00 at the Nizio Gallery, musical performance by the artist with the participation of guitarist Michal Wojtyla aka Micky Free,
Katarzyna Swinarska’s performance with music by guitarist Michał Wojtyła will be a melorecitation of a text created on the basis of excerpts from Jolanta Brach-Czaina’s book “Szczelina istnienia” (“The Cracks of Existence”), about love as an experience that makes it possible, similarly to death, to touch the substance of existence. Through the costumes, the character of the text and music it will refer to the aesthetics of the Romanticism era.

“Heart” an exhibition by Katarzyna Swinarska at WuWu Vodka Bar.
Exhibition duration: May 22 – September 30, 2020, 1 Koneser Square, Koneser Press Center
In WuWu we present a series of objects on Plexiglas “Heart”, which the artist made in search of an answer to the question of how to create an image that, like the body, is not cut off from the environment, but merges with it.

25.09.2020 Meeting around the book “Reborn Dogs. New interpretations of art towards the non-human” with Katarzyna Swinarska, Izabela Chamczyk, moderated by Magdalena Swacha and Karolina Pikosz.

Organizer: Nizio Gallery
Co-organizer: Nizio Design International
Honorary Patrons: Iwona Sojka-Kozłowska Mayor of the Praga-Północ District of the City of Warsaw, Mayor of the City of Gdańsk, Prof. Krzysztof Polkowski Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk,
Media patrons:
TVP KULTURA, ARTINFO, RMF Classic, Trendy Art of Living, Radio Kampus, Radio Praga, G’rls ROOM, Weekly Review
Sponsor: WINKOLEKCJA

Monday – Friday: 10.00 – 18.00
wstęp wolny

Galeria Nizio, ul. Inżynierska 3 lok. 4, 03-410 Warsaw
www.nizio.com.pl / + 48 602 863 485