Agnieszka Kalinowska is one of the most interesting Polish artists that debuted after the year 2000. She graduated from The Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. She has staged both solo and group exhibitions ever since. The artist lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.
Agnieszka Kalinowska’s output can be defined as an indicator of the condition of modern society. The artist analyses the mechanisms ruling the world and the individuals that live in it. She focuses on an individual suspended altogether with his or her emotions in today’s geopolitical context. While analysing the ”here and now”, the artist makes a generalization revealing the primeval patterns organizing each individual’s reality. One of the social emotions that attracts her is the permanent state of insecurity and utopian attempts to tame that fear. Her works analyse problems related to assignment and securing a territory, politics that preserves atavistic rituals of power, giving a false sense of protection to an individual.
An important element of Agnieszka Kalinowska’s works is the process of conceiving a piece of art. Her video art is often the result of a social experiment. In her sculptures, she makes use of primitive and raw materials, such as brown paper, straw, rope and more recently – branches with bark stripped by wild animals. Her weaving technique reveals affinity to folk art, while the painting method although appears naive, is very rigorous in its limitations when it comes to pasting straw in a determined place. Her works are emotionally challenging for the viewer. Kalinowska analyses the marginalised problems and reveals subconscious fears. The materials used complement each other, none of them is dominant, together they form a multi-layered narrative, ready to be read by the imagination of the viewer.