My Girlfriend is my Friend's Girlfriend

Patryk Różycki’s latest painting cycle explores the experience of love within a chosen family he has formed with his friends. The artist falls in love with his closest friend’s partner, and attempts to depict a relationship that defies conventional notions of love and intimacy. When love enters a friendship among three people, it generates an intensity that demands honesty and open communication.

The exhibition can be read as a diary in which time, rather than sex, emerges as the central protagonist. Time provides a traditional, stable framework for a love story that many would consider unconventional. Różycki structures emotions around key moments – “before” or “after” events such as the beginning of the relationship, the first declaration of love, or the first shared video call with parents. This chronicling impulse takes on a therapeutic function. Fears of intimacy, rejection, and social ostracism gradually lose their paralyzing power as time itself becomes an ally of the love triangle. Closeness, intimacy, and a sense of safety are able to take root in this demanding relationship through the mutual respect with which the three participants measure their shared hours.

The city emerges as another, albeit secondary, character in the cycle. The Zachęta gallery and the cafés “Towarzyska” and “Amatorska” provide the backdrop for the unfolding emotions. Gaudily lit monumental buildings momentarily distract from the couple or trio in the foreground, symbolizing the need to bring a private love story into the public sphere. All those involved consciously agree to make it public.

The most intimate and disarming moments, at times uncomfortable for the viewer, are not the sex scenes. Różycki depicts jealousy through everyday objects – a discarded condom wrapper, the closed door of a friend and partner’s room. The embarrassment stirred by such natural emotions sends shivers through the viewer, while their exposure borders on pleasure.

Although candid and direct, the sex scenes in Różycki’s work are governed by rules that preserve the intimacy of those portrayed. The artist paints his own body unflatteringly, in darker, unnatural tones, rendering himself a kind of abstract backdrop for the alabaster, stylized body of his partner. The lovers’ faces, by contrast, appear austere, stripped of softness, almost neutral.

More personal are the paintings in which the artist “observes” his beloved in everyday situations or converses with his friend in the bathtub. As a result, no single work dominates the cycle. Emotions are distributed evenly, and, as in a computer game, each painting becomes a necessary element that enables progression to the next stage.