Kinga Flasza | I see best when I close my eyes

27.01 - 10.02.2024

Curator: Patrycja Bochenek

GRAND PRIX of the ninth edition of the painting competition 'Attitudes' organised by the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław and mia ART GALLERY.

Kinga Flasza's work is a space for improvisation, a source of joy resulting from the sequence of loose associations arising in her head. The phantasmagoric quality of her paintings, however, is by no means devoid of any real context. They are a mixture of images seen on the internet, scrolled Instagram cats and dogs, film scenes bordering on BDSM, things passed on the street and everyday visual stimuli lined with fears, fascinations and humour.

Kinga Flasza’s works create themselves, as it were, under the eyelids. Caught by the eye, scattered scenes and images, elusive in the flow of events, just before sleep, are linked by a hallucinatory logic. Half-sleep is conducive to grasping the inner relations between things whose relationships and meanings we would not find in the light of day. As Różewicz wrote: "Everything is out there, there are some faces, trees, clouds, dead people.... but it all just flows through me. The horizon closes. I see best when I close my eyes."

Viewing Kinga Flasza's work is like a psychedelic trip. A cow with a unicorn horn, figures devoid of genitalia, a snake eating its own tail or a carpet-like growth on the tongue symbolise what we want them to symbolise. Despite the clear narrative, the artist escapes from assigning meanings; her work is a space given over to the viewer. The paintings and embroideries presented at the exhibition can be seen as illustrations to abstract stories, the content of which lies with us.

Kinga Flasza (b. 1999) - Graduate of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Faculty of Painting. Grand Prix winner of the Attitude IX Competition (2023). Finalist of the 5th All-Polish Leon Wyczółkowski Painting Competition (2022), the Young Art Review IMPULS (2022), the Eibisch Prize (2023) and the All-Polish Young Painting Review PROMOCJE (2023).