The Bearable Stickiness of Being

Artists: Mateusz Gromadzki, Anna Kołacka, Julia Królikowska 

Curator: Marta Smolińska 

“The Bearable Stickiness of Being” explores stickiness as an aesthetic, affective and relational experience. Drawing on the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and contemporary theories of affect, the exhibition moves beyond the opposition between the material and the psychic, presenting reality as a network of entanglements in which human beings are continually implicated in relationships with other bodies, matter and the environment. 

The exhibition brings together works by Mateusz Gromadzki, Anna Kołacka and Julia Królikowska. Although formally distinct, their practices converge around questions of corporeality, organicity and interdependence. 

In Anna Kołacka’s paintings, stickiness manifests itself as the intense, pulsating materiality of the image. The artist constructs multilayered compositions inspired by nature’s microstructures and processes of transformation, creating painterly environments that draw the viewer into an experience of density, movement and continuous change. Her paintings function like visual organisms—hypnotic, sensual and resistant to unequivocal identification. 

Julia Królikowska’s works focus on what lies concealed beneath the surface of the body. Painted on translucent organza, the compositions evoke tissues, membranes and internal structures, hovering between abstraction and corporeal suggestion. Here, the delicacy of the medium meets the intensity of affective experience: the images appear fragile yet almost haptic, clinging to memory and perception. 

Mateusz Gromadzki’s installations and objects develop stickiness as a category of interspecies relations. The artist works with organic matter—plant tissues, wax and branches—to create forms that transcend the divide between nature and culture. Rather than merely representing the natural world, his works introduce it into the exhibition space as an active presence, giving rise to an experience of proximity, tenderness and empathic connection. 

“The Bearable Stickiness of Being” invites us to view stickiness not as a category of disgust or discomfort, but as a means of forging relationships. The exhibition asks how we might experience coexistence with other forms of life and how art can become a space of intense being-with. The project brings together three distinctive artistic practices, forming a coherent and timely statement on corporeality, ecology and interdependence in the contemporary world.