Martyna Borowiecka

Martyna Borowiecka practices easel painting and drawings, creates objects and painting installations. In 2019, she graduated with a PhD from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. The artist reinterprets and modernizes the language of still life painting. In this context, she is particularly interested in transforming the technique of trompe-l'oeil for her own needs. In her canvasses, Borowiecka creates the illusion of a three-dimensional space, carefully scrutinizing the various types of materials such as plastic, aluminium, wood, or differently textured fabrics. To this end, she transforms her studio into a research laboratory: first, she arranges and drapes the fabric for hours, and then studies, sketches, and translates it into the language of two-dimensional space. For Borowiecka, a painting constitutes a space for reflection on the rules of seeing. The artist strives to blur the boundaries between what is real, and what is imagined and added by the viewer. In her paintings presented at the exhibition, the question of trompe-l'oeil is enriched by a reflection on the painterly qualities of the collage. Borowiecka’s canvasses are based on still life observation, but also include reconstructed elements of collages created by the artist. The titles of each work come from Joan Lindsay's book, ‘The Picnic at Hanging Rock’. The mind accustomed to the search for a logical explanation of seen representations becomes entangled and disoriented in the obliqueness, mismatched elements, and the dense and gloomy, anxiety ridden atmosphere of the paintings.