The exhibition presents the work of Polish artists, among them Paulina Ołowska, in the broader context of international women’s painting, which takes on the challenge of representing the intensity of the external and internal worlds. The invited artists propose an affirmative version of womanhood by endowing their bodies with agency, autonomy and power of self-determination. The eponymous paint becomes a visceral, sticky matter that leads us towards the point where all meanings collapse. It blurs the categories of power and objectification, thus provoking the question of when do we look, and when do we look away?

Increasingly, contemporary women painters create private and introspection-based pieces saturated with disturbing sexuality; works that are sometimes obscene, audacious, and simultaneously not devoid of humour or grotesque. Affect serves the invited painters to reflect on an extraordinary, intricate network of meaning: excess and pleasure, but also the experience of violence, violence often characterised by ambiguity.

For more information, please click here.

Image: Paulina Ołowska, Her English Is Far From Perfect..., 2013