Living space

La Cometa is pleased to present Living space, a solo exhibition by Polish-born, Miami-based artist Justyna Kisielewicz.

Justyna Kisielewicz confronts the legacies of colonialism and our shared pursuit of freedom in Living Space, her most ambitious exhibition to date. According to the artist, the work “explores Polish history within the context of multiple sites of global oppression, including the colonial project in the Americas and our current climate crisis.” Her kaleidoscopic, atemporal oil paintings weave together disparate historical periods, lush Florida vegetation, a pantheon of symbolic animals, and the omnipresence of two masked figures decked in luxury fashion. Her menagerie includes mischievous monkeys, embroidered hummingbirds and orchids, undulating giant serpents and—in a nod to her adopted home—an alligator. These creatures and plants animate the scene, with each functioning as a symbol of human vices and virtues.

Humor threads through the work: googly-eyed cartoon clouds, crocheted penises, and the occasional self-portrait of Kisielewicz and her beloved Pomeranian, Charlie Brown. Her idiosyncratic iconography injects mischief and levity into otherwise sobering subject matter.

Kisielewicz explains that in the exhibition’s largest painting, Lebensraum, the two oversized, masked figures wearing hot pink satin gloves take her back to childhood, when she devoured adventure stories like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Gulliver's Travels. These patriarchal narratives center on larger-than-life men exploring exotic lands populated by fantastical creatures and little people. Often framed as “discovery” narratives, these popular tales perpetuate the colonial binary of a “civilized” culture conquering naive or “primitive” people. “These are colonizers stepping onto ‘virgin’ lands where they found natives and turned them into noble savages via the process of civilizing,” she writes.

Kisielewicz’s paintings flip these colonial narratives, seducing viewers towards critical inquiry. “I use color as bait,” she explains, “a trap to lure people into taking a closer look at my detailed, historical vignettes.” The initial allure of her vibrant, saturated palette gives way to intricate, layered scenes full of allegory, historical contradictions and dark humor. Her work compels viewers to pause, look, and re-examine our understanding of history, consumption and colonialism. She explores the narrative of “the other” while interrogating the powers that shape and write global history.

While forms of colonial violence and displacement are often framed as past historical events, many scholars view them as portals to the present and the future. Kisielewicz’s atemporal canvases are examples of how art can serve as a tool for making sense of the past, present, and future. Drawing on her own family’s difficult past she critically interprets oppressive historical structures rooted in race, class, violence, and empire. History has traditionally been written from the colonizer’s perspective, but Kisielewicz’s work aligns with postcolonial thought, challenging and critiquing this biased historical narrative. She reclaims her power as the narrator of her own experience, a common theme in postcolonial art, and urges us to question, challenge, and finally reimagine both the historic past and our present reality. Cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha calls this the “right to narrate,” a concept that refers to the power and authority to re-write history from the margins. This reclamation is a fundamental facet of freedom that comes from challenging dominant discourses and reclaiming agency. Kisielewicz does exactly that and more.

Living space, the title of both the exhibition and the largest work in the show, recalls one of the darkest periods in modern European history. In German, Lebensraum refers to Nazi ideology fueled by notions of racial superiority, which Hitler used to justify his aggressive and violent eastward expansion. According to Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, “the Nazi leadership envisioned an eastern frontier to be depopulated and deindustrialized, and then remade as the agrarian domain of German masters.” Germany’s lack of fertile farmland led to the pursuit of territories in Eastern Europe cleansed of Slavic and Jewish populations. Here the Nazis borrowed from the nineteenth-century American belief in Manifest destiny which claimed the U.S. was “destined” and entitled to expand its dominion and spread democracy and prosperity across North America. This colonial ideology fueled North American westward expansion and led to the unlawful displacement of Native Americans. It was the precursor of Hitler’s Eastern expansion and the horrific annihilation of Poles and other Slavic people.

As aforementioned, the Nazi eastern expansion, and the eponymous exhibition, are both titled Lebensraum, or Living space. In relocating to verdant Florida, a place so unlike the drab, Soviet-era Warsaw where she grew up and through her vibrant, color- drenched canvases, Kisielewicz has reclaimed her own Living space, not through violent conquest but as a personal act of reclamation. Set against the often brutal backdrop of global history, this exhibition takes us on an artist's journey towards freedom, a beacon of hope in these troubling times. Homi K. Bhabha reminds us that “freedom is an internal process of reflecting and finding resources of agency from within.”

Kisielewicz’s art deconstructs historical narratives of the colonized, demanding the viewer’s attention through her idiosyncratic iconography: idealized landscapes, sumptuous designer silk scarves and magical creatures. In the face of our violent pasts and uncertain futures, Living space insists on our individual right to remember, to question, and to create a new world.