Abrupt

A sudden break. A moment that never had the chance to finish, already turning into memory. Abrupt brings together two artists — Konrad Krzyżanowski and Andrii Rachynskyi — in a space where the image doesn’t narrate so much as reverberate, like an echo. It speaks of what slips away, of an event that leaves only a flicker instead of a full ending. 

Konrad Krzyżanowski builds his paintings out of discontinuity. His canvases grow from a collection of digital and analog fragments: scattered photographs, accidental frames, abrupt close-ups. Memory here is in a state of both decay and montage, where figures and objects bleed into one another to form new, intuitive constellations. In a single painting, people who never met can suddenly share the same surface; a gesture from years ago may collide with an object seen only yesterday. Each work becomes a visual record of thought — a dream in which facts shift, and time and relationships lose their coherence. 

Andrii Rachynskyi works with bromoil, a soft, elusive process where photography brushes against painting. His series summons Kharkiv on the brink of catastrophe: a city caught in half-light, suspended between the everyday and the oncoming terror. Figures from 1930s cartoons and fairy tales drift through the images — an era when fear hung in the air and children’s bedtime rhymes often ended in darkness. In Rachynskyi’s work, fear is not merely a subject but a substance, present in the empty spaces, in the delicate grain, in the touch of hand-applied ink. 

Abrupt is a meditation on what stops abruptly: a glance that never returns, a gesture left unresolved. On the hush after sound, the trace that remains when everything else has vanished. This exhibition does not document events; it summons them — so that what has been interrupted continues to resonate within us.