paintings
text: Hanna Wróblewska
The artist’s focus on a single gesture, one colour, and a fragmentary mode of notation makes the extraordinary subtlety of these canvases at the same time charged with a deep, underlying dramatic tension. It is as if the blood from Burska’s hospital photographs from the beginning of her artistic path, now less red and less literal, has gained in dramatic force through the artist’s own personalised gesture, full of emotion yet also control. Her paintings sometimes resemble calligraphic records that conceal emotions, events, and facts alike. In a sense, they recall Burska’s dramas, in which specific characters were assigned dialogues, texts, and personalised expressions. Her drawings, canvases, and notations do not represent, even if they begin with a specific image; they do not explain, describe, or persuade, but negotiate. They mediate between the artist in the studio and the world beyond it; between interior and exterior; between the viewer, reader, or audience and that which lies outside them. Burska’s entirely new painting appears at once remarkably consistent and fully coherent with her work as a whole.
Excerpt from Hanna Wróblewska’s text for the exhibition Watercolors at Galeria Szara in Warsaw, 2022.