Agata Przyżycka
We Embrace into Stillness
Sarah Kravitz Gallery, London
26 July – 7 September 2024
Curated by Maria Dolfini
“I was naked and I remember warmth, which was sunlight and my mother. The sunlight touched my skin, which was a threshold for sensation and love. Love and sensation passed into my organs, tissues, fluids, and into the parts of human being that words as definitions only weakly describe, into my soul, heart, intellect. These loci of liminality defined my bodily existence.
I have no recollection of my contour, the discreteness that turns the human body in the human mind into boundary, barrier, and object. I was lying down, as soft as the sheets or blankets that cushioned me and, like me, radiated light. [..] I see now that the primary significance of what I call soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-the-body is rooted in my earliest existence, where eros and psyche were wed.”
- Erotic Faculties, Joanna Frueh, 1996
Sarah Kravitz is pleased to present We Embrace into Stillness, the debut solo exhibition in the UK of Polish artist Agata Przyżycka (b. 1992, Toruń), opening on July 25th and running through to September 7th, 2024. Mountains and oceans of voluptuous contours and entangled fragments of — mostly female — bodies inhabit the vibrant, lascivious realms of Agata Przyżycka. At once sensual and surreal, bucolic and metaphysical, her new large landscapes are painted with a seductive pastel-colour palette and quiet precision. Drawing its title from the carnal verses of Polish poet Halina Poświatowska (1935-1967) and invoking the idea of bodyscape — a photographic style whereby the landscape is seen as body and the body conveys the impression of landscape —, the exhibition explores the relationship between nature, the human body, and intimacy.
The association between the female body and nature has been a long-standing theme in art history, mostly deployed by male painters to represent traditional concepts around womanhood tout court — their nurturing, fertile, and indomitable nature. Starting from the 19th century, this space has been reclaimed by women artists in transformative ways, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Hilma Af Klint, and Agnes Pelton, who advocated for a special relationship between nature, the female body and their own desires. Fluidly oscillating between figuration and abstraction, Przyżycka’s spiritual and erotic paintings inevitably pay tribute to this lineage of artists while engendering new personal narratives. By fragmenting and reassembling body parts, her practice champions the female body as experimental landscape and reports her own experience of desire and oneness with nature in the age of technological (dis)connection.
Photography quietly underpins all of Przyżycka’s paintings. Having completed a PhD in Painting and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Poland, Przyżycka starts her paintings with photographs of her kin and friends. These close-up shots help her capture the softness of the skin and the body’s voluptuous curves, bringing her closer to her own body. To eschew photography’s realism, she then cuts and dissects the photographs, re-puzzling them into collages of undulating shapes. These collages form the basis for her larger canvases and become artworks in their own right. “Photography is like an alphabet to my paintings, then arranged into words”, the artist posits. Like an alphabet, her photographs are black and white, while her canvases are baked in seductive sorbet-like colours that “come from my heart and nature.”
Eroticism plays an important role in Przyżycka’s oeuvre, at times addressed explicitly and at others only suggested. Having grown up in a conservative environment in Poland, her paintings are a way to come to terms with her own body and to normalise the viewer’s relationship with nudity and sexuality. ‘The sun - she cried - the sun’ (2024) stems from a collage of stills from porn films. Lascivious scenes of sexual interaction are paired with entangled limps, arranged in the outline of hills. In ‘We Embrace in Stillness’ and ‘She Touches the Motionless Mountain’s (2024), the shapes become more abstract and meditational, and the palette more pastel-like, suggesting respectively the undulant waves of the sea at dusk and the sun rising within a cave of dormant figures. In ‘I Didn't Encounter You on the Green Earth’ and ‘And All of This Is Within Her’ (2024) recognisable bodies in diametrically opposite postures inform the picture plane, climbing on top of each other to resemble the peak of a mountain. With the figures stretching upwards as if rising towards the sky, the works are imbued with hope, presence and enlightened stillness.
In We Embrace into Stillness at Sarah Kravitz, Przyzycka invites us to delve into her surreal and sensual bodyscapes, to get lost into her forests of entangled somas. By destructing and reconstructing the body, Przyżycka reclaims the erotic relationship between womanhood and the Earth and builds a polygonal ecosystem of desire. With a soft colour palette and a bucolic aura, she transports us into her reveries, which are symbolist, meditational and above all, lubricious.
- Words by Maria Dolfini
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Kravitz Gallery.