Artist: Sarah Księska
Exhibition title: Manhole
Venue: Piktogram, Warsaw, Poland
Date: May 31 – July 27, 2019
Photography: Bartosz Górka / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Piktogram, Warsaw
Those works on reflective Tetrapak emerged out of a digital painting process. While painting with a bluetooth pen in a drawing app, I became interested in the importance of the human mistake, as evidence of truth and believability. Working digitally meant having the ability to undo your mistakes and plan the perfect picture, setting every gesture in the right place.
Tetrapak as a painting material let me explore similar techniques as working with screens: the possibility of wiping away the paint, exploring gesture and control, as well as an illusion of depth. These became a kind of painterly caricature, questioning the sincerity of expressionism. In these paintings I worked out a collection of symbolically ambiguous narratives, all of which emerged while making a fictional trip through a manhole. Most of the figures play with the empathy of the viewer and invite a meditation upon the influence of current postmodernism.
