MAGDALENA DREŚCIK. Hot and Cold. There’s no-one here

The works of Magdalena Dreścik enter a dialogue with the tradition of geometric abstraction, a trend in painting which originated in the New York School in the 1960s, and with deconstructivism, which revolutionised the perception of a solid in both art and architecture. The conceptions of Frank Gehry, Frank Stella or Peter Eisenman, which constituted a critical development of postmodernist ideas, remodelled the vision of figurative representation. The detail, the abstract ornament, the skeleton and the structure became the focus of the artists’ attention, while endless variations of the fundamental object, and the isolated detail and its mutations, were the subject of presentation. Focus on the ideas of the deconstructivists and their creative embodiment in the material of the work are evident in Magdalena Dreścik’s oeuvre.

Her earliest works were hyper-realist images of wooden detached houses against a white background. The photographic realism of colourful, idyllic suburban houses was metamorphosed into a deconstructed skeleton, a model. Dreścik subjected the object to painterly analysis by means of methods derived from the tradition of abstractionism, i.e. by focusing on the detail, the formal rigour, which became the material for the work. Yet Dreścik’s canvases are not imbued with a chill aesthetics of an isolated solid; the use of colour and the lines that resemble matches make the forms assume a living substance; they embody an everlasting yearning for homeliness, a search for one’s roots and a taming of lost spaces.

The works of Magdalena Dreścik presented on the upper level of the Arsenal Gallery power station were created with the aid of the President of Białystok scholarship for young artists. Abstract paining emanates a visual field which constitutes a performative act of speech. What do Magdalena Dreścik’s painting tell us? Hot and Cold. There’s no-one’s here recounts the sad process of the wooden architecture of Białystok being devastated. „There’s no-one here” conveys not only the absence of people who once dwelt in these spaces, but the absence of anyone who would have spared a kind thought for the ruined remains of the city’s wooden architecture and gave them a new lease of life.

Magdalena Dreścik’s art is not only a creative and personal conversation with the traditions of 20th-century painting, but also an attempt at allaying a nomad’s yearning for a stable home; an attempt at turning attention to the disintegration and demise of the city’s wooden architecture by means of the visual language of non-figurative painting that only seems totally abstract.

Michał Łukaszuk

Magdalena Dreścik, b. 1992 in Białystok, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She acquired the diploma at Prof. Jarosław Modzelewski’s painting studio in 2016. She is the laureate of the President of Białystok scholarship for young artists, a finalist of the Promocje 2016 competition at the Gallery of Art in Legnica, a finalist of the Polygonum 4 competition at the Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz, and the Grand Prix laureate in the 2016 Painting Competition of Franciszka Eibisch Foundation.