Glassy Light, Glassy Days

Maja Kitajewska's art is first of all about touch, shine and time. The shine is light refracted on thousands of bright glass beads. Time is needed to to sew them onto the surface of the painting. To grow flowers out of them. To build a rifle out of glass molecules. To weave them into a second skin.
 
"Ornament is crime!" – at the beginning of the 20th century still, the echo of Adolf Loos's words uttered the world of aesthetics. Beads, pearls, sequins are used to beautify the body, clothes, and objects. If you sew them onto a painting, will they decorate it? Is it allowed to embellish paintings? Is Maja Kitajewska committing a crime? Let us rather say that the artist has been dealing with multi dimensional accumulation. She accumulates beads in post painting, glass surfaces, fabrics, even structures, which she detaches from the canvas and let them become objects, flowers, vessels, and even – why not? – body parts, skin, hands – a mouth, a heart.
She piles up time, hours and days, spending it on precise, patient work that is a systematic creation. She condenses the energy needed to perform her work. The objects of accumulation are also the colour and shine of thousands of glass elements subordinated to the artist's imagination. Thus, each of Maja Kitajewska's works is a composition and representation and each of them is also a reservoir of touch, time, energy and light – a resource that is condensed by the artist and released when another person's gaze falls upon it.