As you walk into the ‘Pasithea’ exhibition by Agnieszka Apoznańska at Lotna Gallery in Warsaw, you can feel your tiredness melting away, even though the long winter shows no sign of easing.
Right at the entrance you are greeted by… a scent. It is unusual, because after all we have come to a painting exhibition. But this show aims to awakens more of our senses.
Zuzanna Ziętek, who specialises in combining fragrance and art, has created a special perfume for Agnieszka Apoznańska’s exhibition that reflects its mood.
‘The scent complements these wonderful works, which are very intimate, soft, full of subtle nuances and, in my view, harmonise perfectly with the fragrance I created especially for this exhibition. The scent completes the artist’s paintings: it is enveloping, sweet, warm and has something slightly mysterious about it,’ explains Ziętek.
The 44 paintings are intended as an invitation to effortless rest. As curator Julia Barbasiewicz says, the ‘Pasithea’ exhibition is a tribute to relaxation you do not have to justify.
Pasithea is the Greek goddess of relaxation, rest and hallucinations, the youngest of Venus’s companions and the wife of Hypnos, the god of sleep. She embodies the idea the artist is trying to convey in her works.
‘They are very oneiric, dreamlike. Agnieszka blurs the contours in her paintings, which is very characteristic of her. And it is precisely on this kind of softness and slight unreality of these situations that we have built the “Pasithea” exhibition. We would like it to be an invitation to rest, but also to let go of a certain pose, a certain mask we wear every day,’ the curator explains.
Shades of pink dominate in Agnieszka Apoznańska’s works. It is a colour that has many meanings for her.
‘For me it is a colour that is at once very feminine, stereotypically feminine – little girls are pink – but it is also associated with closeness, with the warmth of the mother’s womb, and with skin, with a very strong sense of corporeality. With each work I explore it in a slightly different direction, trying to draw out the intimate qualities of this colour, and sometimes the repellent ones. A dirty pink that may remind you of a scratch on the skin, that can verge on the colour of blood, that can stir unease in us, and on the other hand can evoke a feeling of warmth, love and the almost tangible texture of this colour,’ explains Apoznańska.
The painter admits that the opening is one of the few moments when she can see so many of her paintings together at once and can play with them a little.
‘I work on a single idea, which I explore from painting to painting. In this case it was the theme of rest, relaxation and the need to find yourself in it. With each subsequent work I found that rest in a different symbol, or a different intensity of colour, or a fragment of the body. Each work gave me a hint of what the next one would look like,’ says Apoznańska.
There is no single way to experience the ‘Pasithea’ exhibition.
‘The paintings work like a kind of jigsaw puzzle, and the paths you can trace for yourself between them are certain motifs that recur. But this is not imposed either by the artist or by me. We want everyone to be able to build their own story on the basis of Agnieszka’s works,’ says curator Julia Barnasiewicz.
Agnieszka Apoznańska confides that she likes the fact that when she works with many paintings at the same time, she can eventually arrange them like a puzzle.
‘Juxtaposing one path I followed with another – for example a piece of the body with a symbol, with another colour, and so on. With this display I could play a little, juxtaposing formats, close-ups and details,’ the painter says.
The artist would like visitors to play this game too. ‘By walking around and looking for the story and the thread that passes from work to work. To look at one painting and after a moment continue their thought in the next one. Just as I do in my process,’ she encourages.
The exhibition also features the motif of a curtain. It is a pink, circular, transparent drape installed among the paintings, through which you can look at a blurred world of the kind that Apoznańska presents in her works.
‘The motif of a curtain also appears in the exhibition – both in the paintings and physically – a curtain behind which we no longer have to perform for other people. You can step into it, in a sense like into a portal where you can hide, but through which you can also look at the works,’ says the exhibition’s curator.
The painting exhibition ‘Pasithea‘ by Agnieszka Apoznańska can be seen at Lotna Gallery in Warsaw until 6 March.