Katherine SWINARSKA (b. 1969), Lady with canaries, from the series: Fleeing the war, 2022

acrylic, canvas; 150 x 110 cm;
Signed, dated and described on the back: KSwinarska / 2022 / "LADY WITH CANARIES" / FROM "FLEEING / THE WAR" SERIES.

Katarzyna Swinarska practices painting, video art and performance. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk. In 2014 she defended her doctoral thesis, whose supervisor was Henryk Cześnik, also associated with the Gdansk art community. The artist made her debut with a series of paintings presented at the post-competition exhibition of the 39th Biennale of Painting "Bielska Jesień" in 2009. In 2017, she presented the film We - A Common Organism talking about love and rivalry among artistic couples, and realized the painting project Biophilia for the International Festival inSPIRACJE 12th Breathtaking in Szczecin. In 2018, she showed the performance project Black Dress. In 2019, her new project Innocent Colonies was shown at the Gdansk City Gallery. It seems that Katarzyna Swinarska's work deals with the theme of gender in culture in the context of social and historical conditions and the relations or dependencies between them.

For centuries, the image of a man's face has represented power, influencing religious ideas of the cosmic order and earthly political systems. The portrait of a man is contrasted in my work with the figure of a woman, depicted in European tradition mainly as a sexual object. This basic difference in the representation of men and women, in my opinion, has an impact on the formation of subjectivity, attitude to one's own body and social behavior - Catherine Swinarska.