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In Brave are the tiny stones sleeping in wild rivers, two figures in fetal positions lie submerged beneath amniotic waves of blue, positioned on two stones, or kidneys, or lungs, as time and the elements work upon them. This desire of dissolution – a consummation devoutly to be wished – calls to mind a theme within feminist speculative fiction, such as in Anne Richter's The Sleep of Plants (1967), of women who, tired and wanting to opt out of their prescribed existences, transition into trees.
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Kinga Bartis
Brave are the tiny stones sleeping in wild rivers, 2024Oil on linen
200 x 300 cm (78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in) -
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Kinga Bartis' work conjures such alternative, expansive, posthumanist ways of communing. In harmony with the cyclical nature of organic time, this exhibition begins at its end, with the three panels Spektrum of Love, Time for Space, and Rootless Strangers. A central looming tree cast in bright, rich crimson hues is flanked by two rhyming sylvan caryatids. Ambiguously positioned in space and teeming with hidden narratives and lifeforms, the triptych stands like a portal. Not a dead-end but a door.
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In Kinga Bartis' studio, beholding the works, I am awash in a sense of intense loneliness and longing. The alienating experience of being 'In a one.' Is this not the cruelty of being human, of existing in a body, restrained by corporeal subjectivity? Can we ever really touch another? Can anyone ever truly know us? (Has not every lover, at least once, fantasized of climbing into the skin of their beloved?) Yet this is a fundament of being alive, in this human form. That we each move through this life, through our subjective perspectives, utterly alone.
And yet we are never alone, we exist as one molecule in the infinite matrices of the circumstances and contexts from which we emerge. Sometimes this sense of isolation is devastating, fatal even, but one we must all come to terms with: a universal amor fati.
— Mélanie Scheiner, curator and writer
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Kinga Bartis
Before, I was mostly me, 2024Oil on linen
200 x 140 cm (78 3/4 x 55 1/8 in) -
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In Lie where the soil is tender and you will become, a titanic charcoal forest of bodies with roots for feet stand shoulder to shoulder, collectively supporting the length of a slumbering supine figure, claiming and nourishing her as one of their own, like a forest’s mycelium network.
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Kinga Bartis
Lie where the soil is tender and you will become, 2024Mixed media on canvas
Diptych
Overall 245 x 300 cm (96 1/2 x 118 1/8 in)
Each 245 x 150 cm (96 1/2 x 59 in) -
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Kinga Bartis
Home/ Portrait of a shell, 2024Oil on linen
120 x 150 cm (47 1/4 x 59 in) -
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The wrench at the heart of Bartis’ paintings is this negotiation of differentiation; of the self as hopelessly individual and infinitely intertwined with the world around it.
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Kinga Bartis
A blind landscape, 2024Oil on canvas on board
33 x 46 cm (13 x 18 1/8 in)
Framed: 35.1 x 48.2 x 3.5 cm (13 7/8 x 19 x 1 3/8 in) -
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Inquire Works by Kinga Bartis