News from the Centre

We’re not sure if these are landscapes. But once we start thinking of them in the context of Anna Ostrzołek’s painting, we examine every surface anew, peel away its layers, enter every opening like a cave – convinced that we’ll see and feel more.

The first, “apparent” layer we notice in the artist’s work seems borrowed from the world of fantasy. Strange contaminated spaces, inhabited by various forms. Cosmic vortices, stardust, and shifting dunes like the sands of Arrakis suggest that we all possess the gift of clairvoyance and the readiness to travel between dimensions. Sometimes, we see ourselves – small, misshapen – far off on the horizon, as in the painting Apparent Spaces of the World, or a trace of our presence in the past, like the colorful beach ball in The Fox Knows.... As if we were mechanisms entirely unaware of their own motor functions – and perhaps unwilling to understand them. Such a mechanism stands on the highest hill, with no control over which direction it will go, or whether it will move at all that day.

To reach the second layer, we must pass through one of the holes resembling an eyeball, an airplane window, the entrance to a capsule, or a snow cave. Before us stretches an inner landscapeformed by accumulated tension, like in the painting The Curse. Ostrzołek references a psychological disorder known as dermatillomania or excoriation disorder, which manifests as compulsive skin picking. It’s like digging out intrusive thoughts from oneself in a tar-like stasis, a fixation on detail, and shrinking inward.

Ostrzołek’s painting may evoke the metaphorical approach to landscape in American painting of the 1980s, as if the painter was unknowingly corresponding with Louisa Chase’s Pink Cave or Jed Garet’s Silhouette Valley. In her fantastical works, Louisa Chase merges landscape with anatomy. In Ostrzołek’s Lelum polelum, we seem to glimpse snow-covered cottages in a mountain valley. But what we took for a frosted window may be a gaping mouth with a row of decaying tooth stubs. It’s also possible that in Anna Ostrzołek’s work, we constantly give in to illusions, following false leads. Her paintings, like string theory, offer the viewer a series of additional dimensions.