Dominika Kowynia

Dominika Kowynia has developed a unique style combining the realism of a painterly representation with an expressive struggle against the matter of paint. Colour plays an important role in her works — through the use of colour, she plays with light, emotion, and the force of the depicted scenes. Sometimes, the starting point for her formally refined paintings is literature, and especially writers such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Virginia Woolf. In Kowynia’s paintings one can find interest in ecology, feminism, memory and family relations. The artist does not exactly report on what her eye or imagination has recorded, but rather evokes emotions accompanying the specific scenes. The seemingly ordinary and tame sights shown here are never unambiguous. In the painting ‘A Beautiful Animal’, which can be seen as a presentation of a hunting trophy — unconventional, as the protagonist is a woman, or a manifesto aimed at hunters whose cruelty is exposed. An analogous uncertainty is aroused by the relationship between human and non-human, depicted in ‘Boars’. The artist confronts the viewer with the dilemma of appraising the images, while she keeps a calm distance.