Milky Blind Eye
21 April – 21 May 2023
Julia Kowalska
Curated by Elaine ML Tam
Text by Hector Campbell
During the span of her undergraduate study at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, Julia Kowalska intensely interrogated the importance of figuration, that corporeal consideration currently so prevalent in the field of contemporary painting. Beginning by physically looking inward, she produced a series of sinuous almost biological abstractions that flayed the figure and exposed every gastroenteric, pulmonary or cardiovascular component that underpins our ongoing existence, all amalgamated into a mass of rich sanguine reds and putrid prurient pinks.
Now, however, in her latest paintings produced for ‘Milky Blind Eye’ and those displayed at her recent degree presentation, Kowalska applies a more transcendental approach to introspection. A spiritual soul-searching that, rather than using the body as an agent for abstraction, attempts to instead abstract the body from the figure itself.
The corporeal palette remains, although softened into signature pastel, powdered pinks that appear radiant against the dark, distempered void of the canvas expanse. A hazy halo engulfs each figure as if their spectral skin is translucent and protects an internal light source, an intramural luminescence.
Julia Kawalska
Untitled, 2023
Oil on canvas
130 × 120 cm
The tenebrous, barren backgrounds root each shadowy scene in Kowalska's delicately devised dreamscape, a simulated subconscious from which ephemeral performances present themselves in the foreground, before fading once again into the recesses of a restful or restless psyche. The artist’s interest in, and examination of, certain psychoanalytical arguments, or critical creative treatise, conceptually sustains such hallucinatory histrionics. Be it Julia Kowalska’s uncanny-adjacent theory of abjection, Freud’s own famed unheimlich fascination with fleeting familiarity or the dramatic defamiliarisation favoured by 20th-century Russian formalists.
Julia Kawalska
Untitled, 2023
Oil on canvas
120 × 100 cm
Throughout, the body serves as barrier, battleground and boundary line, skin the superficial site of indiscernible care or conflict. Physical touch is present in much of Kowalska's output, yet its motives are often not didactically defined or easily digestible. Touch here represents both the ways in which we experience the world around us, and the ways in which the world often impresses or impedes itself upon us.
Julia Kawalska
Untitled, 2023
Oil on canvas
140 × 110 cm
The body keeps the score of past and present interpersonal or romantic relationships, and Kowalska is well aware of the ambiguities that being physically involved with another brings. Those contradictions introduced by tactility, the potential to bring pleasure, pain and perhaps both at once. It is these unknowing nuances, these undefined dichotomies that play out across each painting, the pendulum balanced perfectly between affection and fear, desire and dismissal, embrace and attack.
Julia Kawalska
Untitled, 2023
Oil on canvas
140 × 120 cm
Julia Kawalska
Dark Pink Shape Looms in the Mouth, 2023
Oil on canvas
120 × 90 cm
Abandon any hope of elucidation by turning to the artist’s titles, themselves poetic and lyrical as if excerpts from some larger as yet unknown sources, as whilst they each contain snippets of plausible potential again a didactic description is withheld.
Studio visit with Julia Kowalska
