Agata Bogacka
born 1976
Agata Bogacka is one of the most important painters and participants of the early 2000s h artistic life in Poland, the author of drawings and photographs. She has developed a characteristic, suggestive style of acrylic painting on canvas, where a uniform background is contrasted with a strong, graphic contour. In this way, Bogacka recorded her emotional states and everyday experiences, creating an intimate diary and, to some extent, a painterly autobiography. In preparation for painting, she carried out photographic session; her series of unique Polaroids are pioneering (pre-selfie) self-portraits from that period and, so far, have been shown publicly just once (at an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art). The artist would then choose a photo that best reflected her previous mental state and, on canvas, reduced it to a bare minimum: a silhouette and just one or two of the most important attributes. The figures in her paintings are bodies in motion, aware of their own physiology, strength, and limitations, and express rebellion and intensity. In recent years, Bogacka has turned towards abstraction, trying to reflect tensions in interpersonal relations through formal harmonies and disharmonies within the composition of her canvases: rhythms of splashes of paint, lines, colours, and shapes.
