The latest paintings and drawings by Agnieszka Brzezanska are on display through Aug. 4 at Art Gallery. The works focus on ambiguity and on the constant search for identity-as a woman and as an artist. Brzezanska was born in 1972 and graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw in 1997. Her work marks all her metamorphoses, journeys and new experiences. The artist paints in oil, draws and takes photographs. Her materials include Polaroids and colorful magazine clippings.



She has mastered the art of understatement. In many of her portraits of women, characterized by thin contours, closed eyes, pressed lips and stiff upright silhouettes, you can recognize the artist's own image. These figures either seek eye contact or are withdrawn and look away. In recent works, inspired by Wong Kar Wai's movies, a couple in a loving embrace appear. Nudes and erotic scenes are shown amidst blooming flowers in Indian ornaments, with a red horse as a recurring motif. The artist's style emerges from exotic cultures and the archetypal symbols of contemporary civilization.Agnieszka Brzezanska's first solo show in the UK, is the way in which these oddities, invisible to the naked eye, can by chance come to veil the intended subject of a photograph. This delightfully enigmatic show comprised just ten photographs and five paintings (all works untitled, 2006), all of which are bound by a quiet sense of wonder at how easily physical objects may be interchanged with these intangible anomalies.Brzezanska cites the Swiss mystic and artist Emma Kunz (1892?1963) as an influence. Like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Martin, Kunz approached Geometric Abstraction as a means of structuring spiritual ideas, of representing elements of an unseen world. Brzezanska notices how the specks in her photographs are aligned, tracing a beam of light and diminishing in size as they lead towards its source. The seeming randomness of the orbs? appearance in photographs is formalized in the delicate concentric circles of the paintings. While orbs are only made visible in photographs, some of Brzezanska's geometric abstractions are painted in a pearl-white that is impossible to capture on camera, the unframed canvases appearing blank and merging with the white wall behind. Nature recedes slightly in the photographs and becomes completely painted out as the abstractions are heightened.