Paulina Sadowska

In her work, the artist is inspired by old photographs, mainly from the early 20th century. They are usually black and white and connected with unusual events, acts of violence, war scenes or less obvious, mysterious situations. However, the resulting pictures are not straightforward transfers of the original narrations. Quite on the contrary – the author omits, deletes the whole journalistic message of the photos. What is left is what is possible to be painted, thus becoming painting rather than remaining a mere photograph. The literary transmission vanishes and what appears in its place is mysterious emptiness, something resembling dreams, murky apparitions, surreal peripheries, events remembered from the past... Paulina Sadowska also uses landscapes found in the cavernous archives of the Internet. The photographs are starting points on which she bases cycles of black-and-white pictures and animations (also black-and-white), including e.g. Sleeping in the Grass or Wonder Wonder Land. Those monochromatic images, devoid of vivid colours, send a message of alienation, emptiness and threat. The cycles of pictures are usually juxtaposed with film animations, which intensify the reception. In her films, the author introduces minimum movement, putting the characters, forms and objects in barely discernible motion. The subtle shifts immediately change the degree of tension, causing a change in perception. A kind of intimate narration appears, with painful flashbacks and past disappointments. What emerges is a sense of lost hope for a brighter future. In her current works, animations have the same function as signatures in her earlier cycles, i.e. revealing secrets. The clash of those semantic situations – the visible and the hidden – is an important construction element in Paulina Sadowska’s painting, as seen in the cycle There’s No Place Like Home, in which the artist presents large, monochromatic pictures of houses where murders and other serious crimes took place. In terms of visual representation, those houses look just like any other houses.