Ambivalence
I paint nature because observing it is a source of both anxiety and relief for me. This ambivalence drives the ideas for images that keep popping into my head. For as long as I can remember, nature as something bigger, more constant and more powerful than humans has been a soothing reference point for me when I felt the everyday stress of life. However, its power is a reminder of the fragility of human life. Whether the fact that we are part of a larger whole is reassuring or frightening depends on your point of view. Sketches of paintings are created at the intersection of these approaches. In my paintings, the human being is never the main character. If this theme appears at all, it is either as an element equal to the whole of the landscape, or a fragment of the human body intertwined with nature. Quoting Agnès Varda: “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes”.

Layer by layer
When I work on canvas and paper, I most often use the technique of egg tempera. I mix the paint myself in a mortar, just like they did before the invention of oil painting – I grind chicken yolks and dry pigments in it. For me, the choice of painting technique is the result of how I think about the painting, how my imagination works. I construct my works in layers – some are opaque, others transparent. This is how you create a picture space. Besides, this technique best reflects my way of thinking about colour. It allows me to achieve a depth that is impossible with ready-made paints. A few years ago, I felt the need to move away from flat images and started creating painted silk structures in space. They have the quality of sculpture, but in motion. Such an installation reflects the layering of work in tempera, transferring it into three dimensions; and silk, with its sensuality, reaction to the movement of air and light, fits perfectly into my approach to painting as a material substance.

From the left:

• "Stones by the river" (detail), 2022, 150 × 120 cm, egg tempera and oil on canvas.
• "Tongues" (detail), 2022, 73 × 60 cm, egg tempera on canvas.

Sisterhood
Astrida Neimanis writes: “Water not only connects, gives birth and feeds us, keeps us alive – water also disrupts the very categories that underpin social, political, philosophical and environmental thinking, as well as feminist theories and practices”*. In the series of paintings presented last year at my solo exhibition entitled “I was born cold, and my sister hot” at the Polana Institute, the theme of water recurred in most of the works. Sisterhood is a value with great potential and priceless strength for me.

From the left:

• “Congratulations”, 2023, 150 × 120 cm, egg tempera and oil on canvas.
• “Bloom”, 2024, 125 × 95 cm, egg tempera on canvas.

From the left:

• "Watering 3”, 2022, 200 × 165 cm, egg tempera and oil on canvas.
• “Hideout” (detail), 2024, 46 × 38 cm, egg tempera on canvas.

Magdalena Karpińska – born in 1984, visual artist, painter.
From an early age, she knew that she wanted to work in the arts. She studied at the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the studio of Prof. Jarosław Modzelewski, and she also received an annex to her diploma in the studio of public-space art of Prof. Mirosław Duchowski. She made her debut with an exhibition in 2011 at Galeria Czarna in Warsaw, which no longer exists. In the same year, she won the award of the Rector of the E. Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. Since 2017, she has been represented by the Polana Institute gallery in Warsaw. In her works, she explores nature as a carrier of emotions and symbols, utilising the hidden meanings and interrelationships of its diverse forms. From realism and observation of nature, she moves on to its deconstruction. Balancing on the edge of abstraction, she paints sensual images, often with erotic overtones – in her works, leaves often resemble hands and flowers have tongues. In 2024, she opened her first solo exhibition in the USA, at the Carvalho Park Gallery in New York.

*Astrida Neimanis, Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water, in: ed. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, Fanny Söderbäck, Palgrave Macmillan, Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, New York 2012, transl. Sławomir Królak.