BOGNA BURSKA

Bogna Burska studied painting but almost from the very beginning of her artistic activity, she has used a huge variety of means of expression. Two years ago, with her monographic exhibition in Szczecin and Gdańsk, she returned to painting. However, the “Watercolors” exhibition at Galeria Szara is the first presentation of her art focusing only on painting and drawing.
In her latest works, the artist consciously limits the color palette. The white canvas is a neutral background for red and red-and-pink shapes, occasionally contrasted with blue elements or highlighted with yellow. Smears, splotches, and smudges somewhat accidentally suggest certain solutions. They evoke associations with bloodstains, floral elements, tears, or drops of liquid under a microscope with the entire microworld inside of them. Sometimes, they resemble the Rorschach test images: it is the viewer who projects the meaning onto them.
The recent paintings by Burska seem to be extremely coherent and consistent with her other works. They do not represent anything (even if they originate from a specific image), they do not explain, they do not describe, they do not campaign: they negotiate. They are mediators between the artist and the world; between the inside and the outside; between the audience and what is beyond. The drawings serve as another form of these negotiations. They present abstracted fragments of reality. Single or more extended motifs (an eye, a moth drinking a teardrop from a corner of the eye, a face), stubbornly reiterated in various settings and color versions, are like an exercise in sensitivity, a study on vulnerability.
Fascination is mingled with anxiety; the desire to touch – with the fear of touch; gentleness verges on pain.
Bogna Burska – painter, photographer, author of installations, video works, found-footage films, and dramatic texts, director. Associate professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, at the Department of Intermedia. Lecturer at the University of Warsaw, teaching social arts at the Institute of Polish Culture. Blood is a recurring motif in her works: installations blotted with blood-colored paint or red paintings. Burska used to juxtapose beauty with what is commonly perceived as ugly, repellent, revolting. Her art would often be described as a combination of critical art with esthetic issues. For years, she was involved in found-footage videos, revealing the mechanisms of creation and imaging of contemporary cultural narratives. Her latest poetic paintings have become gentle and organic. Burska says that her works deal with problems with building cohesive images of reality. She is the author of “A Nest”, “The End of Violence” (with Magda Mosiewicz), “Rebellion of the Deaf”, and other texts that have been presented in art galleries and theatrical spaces.