Gosia Bartosik

Gosia Bartosik is a painter, illustrator and graphic artist, graduate of the Faculty of Painting and Graphic Arts at the Poznań University of Arts. Her paintings combine the austerity and simplicity of a graphic shortcut with the enigmatic play of colours and shapes balancing on the edge of figurativeness and abstraction. Her painting demonstrates a fascination with street graffiti, neo-expressionism and primitivism. On canvas, the artist confronts her own biography, the fact of being a woman and the roles that are attributed to her. She registers emotional states and feelings generated by this multi-layered identity. In her paintings, the female body often takes on a hybrid form: it is either animal-like or unreal to such an extent that it is often more reminiscent of a female-like creature than a female. The painting presented at the exhibition comes from the series ‘New Women Order — female creativity, communities, and revolutions in the 21st century’, created during Bartosik’s residency at the ZAMEK Culture Centre in Poznań. During the residency, she attempted to construct a coherent figure of the artist — a girl, woman, mother, daughter, lover, little girl and warrior. To this end, she conjured several distinct lives in her paintings. The eponymous character, Etna, is one of them. As the artist says: ‘Etna contains an animal element, she is brave, courageous, wild, primeval, but also self-confident. On the other hand, her poise, somewhat huddled, suggests something exactly opposite: withdrawal, silence, perhaps also shame’.