Dimensions: 120 x 80 cm
signed, dated and described on the reverse: '"NIE_MAMY" | Dorota Kuźnik | 2023'.
Exhibited
"Dorota Kuźnik. (On)A/S(He). Painting/Objects", Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych in Jelenia Góra, 4.08-11.09.2023
Biography
Works mainly in oil painting on canvas and board. Graduate of the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, where she received her master's degree with honors in 2016 in the painting studio of Prof. A. Dymitrowicz and multimedia studio of Prof. W. Pukocz. Graduate of German Philology and Postgraduate Studies at the W. Brandt Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wroclaw. Author of many solo exhibitions, and participant in group exhibitions. Nominated in 2015 to the second stage of the Painting Contest "POSITIONS" for the most interesting artistic attitude among students of the faculty: Painting at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw. She is a laureate of Honorable Mention in the 27th National Youth Painting Review "Promotions" in Legnica and a finalist in the 5th Triennale of Contemporary Painting "Autumn Confrontations", Rzeszów 2019, where she was among 15 artists nominated for the award. Laureate of the honorable mention of the Podkarpackie Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts 6th Triennale of Contemporary Painting "Autumn Confrontations", Rzeszów 2022. Two-time finalist of the 4th and 5th All-Polish Leon Wyczółkowski Painting Competition in Bydgoszcz in 2020 and 2022 , finalist of the 1st All-Polish Krzysztof Grzesiak Painting Competition, Pressure Tower, branch of the Museum in Lębork. She has participated in the YICCA International Contest of Contemporary, as well as the 16th Warsaw Art Fair in Kubicki Arcades and the 18th and 19th Warsaw Art Fair in EXPO XXI Warsaw-International Fair and Congress Center.
The main subject of Dorota Kuźnik's paintings is a woman. The essence of these female images is an attempt to depict what makes up femininity, defines it, determines its status, social and cultural condition and the roles it plays in the contemporary world. In the wide range of female images, the figure of the androgynous woman occupies next to the mother woman and the theme of motherhood and the idea of sisterhood and sisterhood. In addition to the subject matter depicting motherhood, she also creates a positive model of femininity realized outside of motherhood. In the images of seemingly silent women, depicted in stolid poses, there seems to be hidden an attitude that opposes being a victim of destiny, a vocation to fulfill the social role of mother and motherhood ascribed to them, as the only legitimate possibility for the realization and manifestation of their femininity.
The embodiments of femininity present in her paintings are portraits of women, in which she does not focus on rendering a vision of conventional beauty, but rather on shedding attributes considered feminine. Entering into dialogue with post-feminist discourse, she attempts to reinterpret the concept of femininity in painting based on model representations of femininity, ideal, objectified representations of woman traditionally depicted in images of women in painting, thus redefining the position of women functioning in their traditional socially and culturally assigned role. She willingly reaches for subversive strategies. However, this is not extreme feminist interventionism and activism.
By establishing a dialogue with the legacy of ancient art, she reinterprets the language of iconographic patterns of painting of the past. In her paintings, she creates an image of women, inspired stylistically and formally by medieval and early Renaissance painting and the iconographic language of painting of the past. He also refers to the traditions of coffin portraiture, double portraiture and the conventions of photographic portraiture of the Victorian era. Using the motif of the double portrait, she refers to the DUALISM of body and soul, beauty and ugliness, bloom and decay, youth and old age, and finally life and death - a motif that invariably appears in my work. Dorota Kuźnik's work is characterized by the idea of combining established formulas, schemes and conventions of ancient painting imagery with contemporary iconography. Kuznik creates visual connections between classical European painting and the visual sphere of the 21st century. The artist tells how this strategy is reflected in her painting technique: "Over time, I became increasingly fascinated with painting that emphasizes the plane, its flatness, devoid of allusion and illusion, without classically built illusionistic space, without perspective that evokes the illusion of depth. Entering into a dialogue with the hallowed centuries-old Albertan tradition, the post-Renaissance convention of easel painting, I created a series of paintings inscribed in the trend of painting with modernist origins, focused on its inherent constitutive features, such as flatness, painterly matter, abstractness linked to optical illusion. The affirmation of the objectivity of the painting, the focus on its condition and status, and its liberation from conventional thinking about its essence became the starting point of my reflections on the possibilities of pictorial modes."
References to the canons of ancient painting are made on the principle of "letting go" to the grandmaster form, playing with and juggling conventions and patterns of imagery. The artist often enters into a dialogue with them, based on a reflective and sometimes even witty concept or postmodern joke, a playful transformation of tradition, which stems from a conscious creative attitude: "In painting, I am not only concerned with aesthetic values, but with pushing the image as a problem. In the creative process, I am constantly accompanied by the reflection whether the image in contemporary art is already only a response to the condition of contemporary painting and is only part of the current of activities that are a reaction to the crisis of the representation of painting and the old conventions of imaging, to the crisis of the ways of imaging sanctioned by centuries of tradition. I wonder whether in the present times, in the post-artistic, post-modern era, in the era of post-media painting, imaging in the era of electronic media, painting can only be a reaction to the revaluation and exhaustion of the old formula of representation and be reduced to a mere sum of self-reflection?" In this dialogue, he evokes historical forms of painting, motifs, topoi of ancient art, refers to philosophical reflections on the nature, status, possibilities and limitations of painting and image (board painting on a board covered with chalk mortar, icon technology, the post-Albertian tradition of painting understood as fenestra apperta, the polysemy of the mirror, Duchamp's ready mades, object trouve, Gadamer's reflections on the essence of art as a game), transforms their meaning in altered contexts. By inscribing "quotations" from the history of painting art into new narratives, I set in motion an open, yet precisely defined game of meanings.
