Agata Bogacka, “Divisions (Boundaries)”, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 100 cm

Agata Bogacka’s paintings arouse visual anxiety. The successive, overlapping painted spaces consist of mismatches, shifts, clashes. The artist bases her paintings on several elements: the use of just a few gradient colors, broad flat brushstrokes, compositions based on subtraction, and the over painting of successive layers. Thanks to these procedures, the paintings become spatial, seeming to consist of superimposed spaces. These spaces enter into various relations with each other, carrying a charge of tension, contention, and accommodation. Divisions between them are not clear, so the task of working out a balance, naming the parts and understanding their interrelationships, is thrust upon the viewer; in looking at these paintings, we try to cope with this.

In Divisions (Boundaries), from the Galeria Studio Collection, Bogacka raises questions about interpersonal relationships, polarization and differences in position, with subtle but systematic transitions of one color into another, gray into red, until contrasting and impassable boundaries are established. This treatment can also be read as analogous to ongoing social and political processes and climate change. Observed up close, the changes are impossible to grasp. They can be perceived only from a distance. Then, paradoxically, the process that’s happening becomes most visible, but is also irreversible.

Paulina Olszewska