Songs never quite meet

In Dominka Kowynia's painting Songs never quite meet, the figure representing the artist stands at the center – naked, squeezed between other figures, translucent or vanishing. She raises a white flag, while another figure – perhaps representing her subconscious – binds her feet, forcing her to stay at the party. It is her brother’s eighteenth birthday party. A friend slaps him on the butt; the situation evokes backslapping and the position of the artist as the one who is excluded from this social dynamic. In another painting, the artist reverses the roles. She is absent from an original family album photograph, but in the painting she inserts herself – clear, central, asserting control over her surroundings. 

The new exhibition by Dominika Kowynia explores the tension between helplessness and power, fantasies of dominance, and the obligation of care that alternates between feeding on a sense of powerlessness and exploiting mechanisms of control.

When the artist once again turns away from a song that is not hers, as in Direction of the Gaze, it is not an escape but another act of reimagining. She employs solipsism – the philosophical notion that only the perceiving self truly exists and that reality is merely a collection of subjective impressions. This solipsistic approach may come from a sense of disorientation, yet it enables the artist to focus on the symbols of strength and reject the painful elements of reality.

In Kowynia's paintings, family is a painful subject. Fragmented figures, echoes of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, the possessive maternal gesture in Wanting the Best, and the artist’s deliberate allusions to Siri Hustvedt and Didier Eribon all speak to the coldness of the mother-daughter relationship and the emotional neglect of childhood. The distinction between the obligation of care and caregiving itself comes from the artist's reflections on power and vulnerability. The obligation is imposed by the parent, provoking rebellion in the adult child whose emotions were never acknowledged. Caregiving, as in Take Care, which features the artist’s ailing cat, offers a greater sense of control – but also the potential for abuse.

Dominika Kowynia’s exploration of power and helplessness is embodied by two recurring motifs that are present in every painting of the series: shoes and a chessboard that has grown from the floor and gained autonomy. Red shoes symbolize courage and the act of reclaiming control. They trample, they dominate.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, Karen becomes so enchanted by her crimson shoes that she entirely forgets her mother, lying in a humble coffin. For this ingratitude, she is punished – her feet, along with the shoes, are severed. In Wanting the Best, Kowynia paints a possessive mother and a daughter with severed legs, an unsettling echo of the tale’s cruel lesson.

The second recurring motif, the chessboard, appears in disguise  – as a diaper, a tiled floor, or an unfolded road map. It is a symbol of readiness, of an accepted challenge. As if, beyond helplessness and meditations on power, there lingers an addiction to entanglement, a perpetual game of control and resistance.