Let Your Heart Decide

Any time is a good time to look inside yourself and listen to what your inner voice is telling you. There are also moments of uncertainty when the horizon is unclear and familiar points of reference are confused with new phenomena. That's when the order of the heart saves us from the trap of fears and superficial calculations. Let Your Heart Decide is a story by three artists about feelings, desires, and situations in which we find ourselves by choice or by chance. It is a matter of freedom and being in the moment when we want to decide who we will be and what we will do.

Pola Dwurnik makes use of references to the iconography of painting and literary figures to develop an imaginary world of variants, often explicitly in the convention of self-portraiture. Staging herself is a ritual that allows her to look at reality from a different angle, and from the viewer's perspective, also at herself and her humanity. The queen in a white and red goose feather robe formally refers to John Singer Sargent's painting Madame X, an extraordinary portrait captured in profile, initially judged by a prudish audience as vulgar, and later admired for capturing the complex aura, beauty, and character of the woman depicted. Another fascinating example of a reference to literature is the motif of Alcina, which occupies a prominent place in the universe painted by Dwurnik. The exhibition features two previously unseen paintings depicting Alcina's Ascension by White Birds.

Maja Kitajewska presents her most recent painting, which combines oil on canvas with glass bead and sequin embroidery, creating a shiny relief structure in which the painterly gesture is deconstructed, referring to the representation of painting through a shape resembling a brushstroke, made famous in 20th-century history by Roy Lichtenstein. Kitajewska reinterprets this legacy of Pop Art and integrates it into her own visual language, combining elements of painting, fabric, collage, and installation. Slowed down by embroidery, the gesture takes on the symbolic meaning of a decision that takes place over time on many levels and at different speeds, despite the external superficial perception of the moment. The pendant to the painting is a heart under a glass dome, embroidered with glass beads in natural scale.

Alina Kopytsia's textiles and porcelain combine easily recognizable iconographic references with various fantasies. Imbued with a sense of humor, her works speak of role-playing, desires, and freedom of choice. The recycling of materials, hanging threads at the ends of seams, and bright colors give Kopytsia's works an aura of joyful nonchalance typical of someone who knows and likes herself.

All the works in the exhibition, whether by Pola Dwurnik, Maja Kitajewska, or Alina Kopytsia, are a special kind of mirror in which the artists look at themselves as another person, but also at other
people as themselves. After all, art in which we recognize a part of ourselves allows us to live many lives and fully experience our humanity.