Notwithstanding her traditional craft, Paulina Stasik is one of the most original pain­ters of the youn­ger generation. For several years she has con­sisten­tly sub­limated her pain­terly dic­tion. She creates multi-​layered, etherical and sen­suous canvases which in a con­tem­porary and sub­jec­tive fashion decon­struct the female nude. Stasik is interested in the body as a medium con­duc­ting spiritual, sexual and cul­tural energy, but liberated from the binary per­spec­tive. She pur­sues a quest for an ideal, androgynous body of carnal and mythological quality. Her pain­tings essay a return to a lost, supra-​sexual unity. The inter­woven figures, frag­ments of bodies and faces, allude to myths of the creation of the world out of a dismem­bered human being. These quests are over­seen by the Shaman presen­ted in one of the pain­tings, whose image sug­gests the many-​armed figure of the Hindu god­dess Shiva and a woman in numerous forms.

Stasik’s pain­tings, refined in pain­terly terms, emanate a distinct erotic aura and spiritual force. Their charac­teristic range of hues and model­ling result from a precise, time-​consuming pain­ting process involving super­im­position of layer upon layer of glazings of paint.

Stasik’s pain­tings assume solem­nity from their visionary charac­ter and peculiar gravity. The figures, their faces and bodies, are sub­jec­ted to an elaborate idealization, while the spaces in which they are presen­ted are strip­ped of distinct features. It is an abyss, a vast­ness, a watery depth, a kind of prenatal sanc­tuary glowing with a soft light—of daybreak or dusk. The depic­tion of the female figure here car­ries cul­tural referen­ces with clear reminiscen­ces of clas­sical sculp­ture. At the same time, they are life studies of the body with a nearly erotic focus on its sen­sitive parts: palms, faces, torsos. Stasik fluen­tly guides her heroines between the real and sym­bolic worlds, between life and eter­nity, between ecstasy, rap­ture, delight and lethargy, sleep, silence. These pain­tings elaborate a revived matriar­chal mythology where the key qualities are an awareness of the body, shared feeling, and relation­ships based on empathy.

Paulina Stasik (born 1990) is a graduate of the Faculty of Pain­ting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where she also com­pleted her doctorate in 2020. Among other venues, her works have been presen­ted in individual shows at Galeria Wozow­nia (Toruń, 2018 and 2020), Galeria Henryk (Kraków, 2018) and Shefter Gal­lery (Kraków, 2019), and in the prominent exhibition Paint, also known as Blood at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2019). The exhibition Protectresses is the artist’s first individual show in Warsaw.