Malgosia Jankowska

Malgosia Jankowska - Wintem im Wald

Technique: ink on paper

Artist Biography: The painter Malgosia Jankowska was born in 1978 in Sochaczew (Poland) and studied painting in Warsaw and Berlin. With fine brushstrokes, she contrasts people and nature. She masterfully creates paintings of impressive depth and breadth by alternating translucent and pasty colors. Mysteriously, white light bursts through the tree trunks of some paintings like a white mist. The filigree lines, together with the softened tones - sometimes restricted to a single color on a white background - are reminiscent of the Prints of old storybooks. The scenes Malgosia's paintings invite us into are like a fairy tale. In a literal sense, the word "fantastic" is also highly symbolic of the repertoire that Jankowska traverses in her painted world and has become a succinct characteristic of her art: The children in the forest, the wolves or the colossal mushrooms are not only visual images of a reality borrowed in the manner of the Brothers Grimm. Malgosia has endowed herself with a set of figures all her own, which she always puts in relation to each other. The child as an emblem of innocence, wandering free in the dangerous forest, reflects a secret world of the subconscious. Nature becomes the space of buried fears and desires.

 

Malgosia Jankowska, originally from Poland, currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work, created with an impeccable technique, transports the viewer to a world where nature and man coexist in harmony. A good example of this is her work Still life (2021). However, in most of his works, the calmness of the environment seems to be threatened by the appearance of insects and snakes on a larger scale. According to the artist, they represent the constant danger that threatens peace, highlighting the fragile balance of our humanity. At the opposite pole, children represent the most innocent and naive part of civilization, the hope for a better world. Jankowska constructs her works with translucent and highly pigmented variations of watercolors and black, blue and red inks. Each image is carefully nuanced and shaded, playing with tones to create a sharp and subtle effect. The artist uses a fine brush to define the topography, huts and graceful trees. These elements are illustrated in rich detail, while her characters are quirky figures that blur and fade into nature. Each figure or group of people is almost hidden and masked by the beautiful landscape, highlighting not only the pleasure of solitude, but also the psychological power of natural landscapes. Jankowska builds the breadth and depth of her works with her clever use of ink tone, giving her illustrations an evocative and haunting atmosphere, where each piece captures a similar scene but an isolated story. There is a strangeness to each work that captivates the viewer and challenges them to reflect on the story and the mysterious site apparent on the canvas.