Malgosia Jankowska

Malgosia Jankowska paints with fine brush strokes in a style that can be defined as Contemporary Figurative Painting. She sets people and nature in opposition to each other. She masterfully creates pictures of stunning depth and spaciousness by alternating translucent and pastose colors. Mysteriously, white light bursts through the tree trunks of some paintings like a white haze. The filigree lines, together with the softened tones - sometimes restricted to a single color on a white background - hearken back to the engravings of old fairytale books.

The scenes into which Jankowska’s paintings invite us are like a fairytale. In the literal sense, the word “fantastic” is also highly symbolic of the repertoire that Jankowska runs through her painted world and has become a succinct characteristic of her art. Children in the forest, wolves, or colossal toadstools are not just visual images from a borrowed reality à la Brothers Grimm. Jankowska has acquired an ensemble of figures entirely her own, which she always places in relation to one another. The child as emblem of innocence, roaming free in the dangerous forest, mirrors a secret world of the subconscious. Nature becomes the space for buried fears and wishes.