Everything flows in Kinga Bartis’s works. Bodies flow out into waves. Foamy peaks on waves slide up into the skies and become clouds. Clouds stretch their wings like seabirds hovering or diving down below the surface of the water, where they become streams and currents that cause the underwater plants to sway and kiss the women’s toes.
These are bodies with no clear-cut boundaries, spilling out beyond their own contours, rather like when we see our own reflection in rippling water. These are wafting, lapping, gurgling contours that let foreground and background flow into and out of each other upon the almost monochrome canvases, where even the paint appears to have been washed away by gently crashing waves.
These are also bodies that multiply themselves: hands with just a few too many fingers, fingers with rather too many nails, and a body that appears to have three heads. Or perhaps just a single head in motion, either because the woman lets herself drift along with the water or because her reflection is broken up by the waves coming up against the beach.
Shore of Selves is Kinga Bartis’s first institutional solo show, and it’s quite fitting and funny that it should be set at Tranen at all places, an exhibition venue directly connected to the Gentofte Main Library. Funny, because the works roll across the pebbles of the sandy seabed, touching and kissing all the words, books, and theories before retiring with the tide, wanting to be themselves, all their own.
