Avoidants

Gunia Nowik Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Agata Bogacka (b. 1976) for Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2025. The exhibition comprises new paintings that continue Bogacka’s formal and conceptual investigations into systems of power, relationships, and resistance, articulated through her distinctive abstract language.

The gradient—central to her visual vocabulary—serves as a metaphor for the shifting boundaries between individuals and can also be read more broadly, on political and societal levels, as a commentary on patriarchal systems and institutions—those developed by and for the benefit of men. With color as both a structural and emotional agent, Bogacka builds tension, invites resolution, and confronts the systems that shape how we relate to one another, both personally and politically.

In Agata Bogacka’s paintings, formal, psychological, and political questions are inseparable. Relationships between elements, exchanges between backgrounds, colors running into each other, and translucent canvases—all these aspects are abstract in themselves, thus referring to nothing, yet interrelating in parallel with the everyday world. The transparency, the color gradients, the current indefiniteness of the spaces in her paintings are a direct response to renewed instability and uncertainty in the political situation.

The series titles, Avoidants and declarations, allude to a style of politics in which everyone makes declarations, but no one takes responsibility. The block-like empty areas in Declarations do not create a clearly defined space. At the same time, “avoidant” can refer to behavior in which one withdraws from socio-political structures in order to protect oneself.

When speaking in her studio about her motivation, the artist expressed a desire to convey the current psychological and political climate, which can also be understood as a sense of helplessness in the face of events.

The changes, the struggle of intellectual and artistic forces in Poland and beyond, result in energy loss and frustration, where art seems to be the only way to make sense. Working intensely in her studio every day, producing images that create communities while also expressing her own sense of being lost or desperate, is the artist’s way out.

The emotional approach is surprising in the seemingly planned abstractions, which at first appear more detached than engaged. Yet those who look closely will discern jagged color boundaries created by torn tape, vaguely defined pictorial spaces, and open structures. By using dark, coarse canvases and allowing their backgrounds and imperfections to contribute to the texture, Bogacka gives the new series of paintings a heightened haptic quality and depth.

She continues to experiment with different canvases (both dark and bright) and paint applications, taping techniques, and ways of applying highly fluid paint. In the small-format Annexation 2, fragility emerges in a section resembling organic cell growth that seems to spill over into the adjacent surface. Working with a diptych, in which two parts are covered by two contrasting color gradients, introduces a new schizophrenic aspect to her painting.

Bogacka paints herself free in a highly productive way with her new works. For her, painting is a reflective act and, as such, also a reflection on her own position in society. In the two latest canvases from the Equality dream series, which meet on one wall, the colors of the rainbow are applied to unprimed canvas in light brushstrokes that interact with the unpainted surface.

The colored area does not visually appear as the foreground but rather as something that emerges from the depths and becomes visible: the hope that colorful diversity, the true colors, will spread is not abandoned.