Małgorzata Szymankiewicz
I’m better, I’m back
Supposedly, abstract art has been deemed outdated, imperfect as well as dysfunctional, depleted a long ago, and today, it’s more dead than alive in the studios of epigones hopelessly in love with it. However, Małgorzata Szymankiewicz tirelessly takes on its resuscitation, above all within painting, but not only. She explained her strategy in an interview, saying: “Painting has its own limitations (...). Therefore all the time, it must measure up to its own tradition. But perhaps it’s in this that its chance lays. To once again work with abandoned or unfinished motifs in completely new contexts, mixing styles, questioning conventions, redefining – all revive this medium.”
The artist applied a similar method to her latest project, although this time it’s hard to talk about resuscitation, it would be more appropriate to say rehabilitation. At first glance, one can see that the installation presented in the {Bank Pekao Project Room}, made of wood, metal, sponge, rubber and sewn materials, is referring to devices caretakers use to exercise and rehabilitate their patients. Soft, colorful and geometrical objects raise associations with devices used for physiotherapy, elements of the decor of a gymnasium, large toys, gadgets pleasing to the eye of popular culture – but also with forms of contemporary art, the abstract ones. As in her earlier works, Szymankiewicz anew contextualizes various aesthetics, which often seem to be mismatched, with the interest of looking at the emerging hybrid structures. She is playing a game of paper-chase with our imagination, creating forms implying specific shapes remembered from reality; therefore, encouraging the treatment of them as ready objects, only to perturb these analogies after a moment, and to laugh at our need to search for familiar templates in completely abstract compositions. She applied a similar procedure in the painting series Attractions of Abstraction. After fixing one's eyes at the paintings, it was possible to notice outlines of lecherous motives from adult films. The artist next applied the procedure of radically colliding different visual orders in the installation Comfortable Situation from 2011, in which she harmoniously connected the geometrical structure k-dron, invented by Janusz Kapusta in the 1980s, with materials serving people who have a less refined taste when it comes to upholstering the couches or armchairs in their flats.
The collision of visual cliches and the manipulation of perception habits serve the rehabilitation of the modernist genre of art. Nonetheless, as Szymankiewicz says, “images don't exist just to be transferred into language, instead, they should become as communicative as language, maintaining their own specificity.”
