MAGDALENA KARPINSKA
HOW TO MAKE A BOW
OPENING FRIDAY, 03.15.24 | 6 – 9PM
ON VIEW UNTIL 05.04.24
CARVALHO PARK is thrilled to announce the inaugural United States solo exhibition of Warsaw-based artist, Magdalena Karpińska, with the opening of, How To Make A Bow. Karpińska constructs micro-utopias that make inventive use of ordinary objects and affective encounters. They have the look of enchantments, spells. Could a ribbon tied around the stem of a blackened flower banish unhappiness? Could a pistil, if touched correctly, release the energy of germination and flowering?
‘I am not interested in the formal qualities of my work,’ the artist Ana Mendieta once said, ‘but the emotional and sensual ones.’ Karpińska’s latest presentation, How to Make a Bow, resonates with Mendieta’s provocative insistence on the value of feeling. Karpińska’s landscapes are stripped back to luminous auras, which are brought into intimate contact with the biomorphic forms that inhabit them, as though all enclosed within a bell jar. Bypassing conventional storytelling, her paintings lift the viewer into atmospheres freighted with intensified, ambiguous emotion. Karpińska has spoken of her paintings as emerging from the shadows of anxiety. The title of this exhibition, taken from the painting How to make a bow, imagines even the smallest acts of creation as a form of solace. A diaphanous white ribbon is knotted on a mourning bouquet as though it were a ponytail. The resulting talisman derives its enigmatic power from the word’s other meanings: the bow as a wooden weapon, famously wielded by cupid; to bow as to acknowledge power and pay respect. Each painting proposes an everyday ritual of pleasure and freedom. Pause and take in your surroundings, they urge. The paintings imagine forms of communion with nature, where to touch, pick or even simply observe flowers is to share in the energy of their blooming.
In Butter Waves, a moonlit sky is seen from the perspective of a stargazer stretched out on the ground, their vision framed by fronds of trees and undulating pastel colors evocative of sand and sea. For a moment, Karpińska’s solitary figure lies at our side and gently guides our sight. Her inner voyage becomes our own, its light flows through us. The Fruits Outside gazes out a window towards vines loaded with a mysterious crop, a symbol of vitality and abundance just out of reach, flooding the scene with yearning. In Check and Into the Shell, a hand moves inside the head of a semi-translucent flower, promising intimacies with the non-human. Is this a greeting? Or an attempt to gauge some aspect of its physiological existence, as a botanist might? Perhaps it’s both. Indeed, Karpińska’s works suggest a way out of the binary set up in Mendieta’s statement, which reflects a broader trend in the Western philosophical tradition that sets reason against emotion. Karpińska’s privileging of feeling does not foreclose an interest in form. The sensory and physical properties of her subject matter – encounters between humans, animals and plants – come through in an economical visual vocabulary and a brooding, saturated color palette of tempera. The geometric lines and wavering tendrils of leaves and petals are etched into slabs of light. Sun and moon, and the soft curves of flesh, float inside flattened, opaque fields of color. Formal self-consciousness gives these scenes their otherworldly force, and only intensifies the affect which suffuses Karpińska’s protean, organic motifs.
Her imagery taps into a rich history of women artists interested in the divine, occult and esoteric, from the Victorian medium Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884) to Swedish artist Hilma Af Klimt (1862-1944) and American visionary Agnes Pelton (1881-1961). Karpińska’s paintings move between the world of observable phenomena and that of a mystical nonsite at the edge of consciousness, which defies straightforward representation. This realm is evoked through the transparency of her forms, which invite us to float between worlds, suggesting an underside to the solid, given appearance of things. Occasionally she takes this transcendental perception further, as in Anomaly. An enormous plant crouches over a ravine that splits the composition in two, each side presided over by its own celestial dot, one white as a daylight moon and the other a menacing orange. The effect is surreal, gently hallucinatory.
A similar dream logic presides over Bloom: a flower resembling a sunburst or shooting star emerges from a gauzy blue dome, supported by a curvilinear shape that could equally represent soil, human fingers or a mouth. This charged, imaginary quality reaches its height in the painting on silk titled Needle. Raindrops pass through a column of bulbous, colorful ovoids, following the path of a threaded needle in perhaps the most cryptic of Karpińska’s works. Uniting the paintings are a genus of hooded flowers that act as totems, with petals as sensate as an invertebrate’s tentacles. Thrumming with pantheistic energies, they also bring to mind the long history of flowers as tools of divination, as ingredients for witchcraft. Light emanates from these portals into a heightened consciousness, these transcriptions of Karpińska’s interior vision. Engrossing and meditative, they embody clarity and serenity. They gesture to a new way of seeing the world in which every living thing is connected, in possession of a distinct essence, teeming with energy and potential. But these paintings' absorption of esoteric philosophies is such that they cannot be reduced to a single epistemological framework. Karpińska’s synthesis of spiritual thinking amounts to a more general acceptance of unconventional ways of knowing: the non-rational and the intuitive, or as Mendieta has it, the ‘emotional and sensual’.
For all this cosmic exploration, Karpińska remains tied to the realities of our world. Two works in particular address themselves to the experience of womanhood with powerful feminist implications. Swan is a retelling of the myth in which the young Spartan Queen Leda is raped by the Greek God Zeus in the guise of a swan. Karpińska reimagines the story as one of mutual, consensual desire. A spectral swan is wrapped around a large floriform that swoops towards Leda’s splayed legs. Karpińska playfully cites the silhouette of a mountain range, and has Leda’s legs frame the composition, suggesting a devouring power rather than violent submission. Her Leda embraces and envelops the swan as part of an ecstatic union with her surroundings. The image recalls the British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun’s 1938 painting Scylla, another subversive retelling of Greek myth that blends the female body with rugged landscape and elemental forces. Composed of four panels of silk, Karpińska’s Wonder Woman Cape represents a related feminist intervention. Partly inspired by the story of the superheroine’s maker, William Moulton Marston, and the partners in his polycule, Elizabeth Holloway Marston and Olive Byrne, the cape reverberates with other stories of extraordinary women, including Karpińska’s friends. Female friendship might not sound as though it bears much relationship to the divine. But in Karpińska’s universe, with its private pantheon of symbols and goddesses, such associations start to seem natural.
Essay by Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Fellow at The University of St Andrews and Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, United Kingdom. Birrell is author of This Dark Country; Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century.
Magdalena Karpińska (b. 1984, Poland) is a graduate of the Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw, Poland, where she currently lives and works. Her work has been shown in notable solo and group exhibitions with Polana Institute, Warsaw, Poland; CARVALHO PARK, New York, USA; Hyperbien, Montreuil, France; Art Walk Gallery, Warsaw, Poland; BWA Municipal Art Gallery of Bydgoszcz, Poland; Platan Gallery, Budapest, Hungary; See Marais, Paris, France; Sage Culture, Los Angeles, USA; Szara Gallery Katowice + Krupa Gallery Wrocław, Poland; among others. Institutional group shows include those held at the Central Museum of Textiles, Łódź, Poland; Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland; Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun, Poland; and Museum of Contemporery Sculpture, Orońsko, Poland. Karpińska has been awarded the Scholarship of The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, GrandFront Award for The Wysokie Obcasy cover, and the Geppert Competition Award.