Ewa Babiarz_Passenger_Parasite_2026_oil and acrylic on canvas_120 × 160
Painting
Ewa Babiarz
Martyna Czech
Klaudia Prabucka
Zuzanna Szary
Katarzyna Szeszycka
The stories of the artists invited to participate in the exhibition inaugurating the activity of NAF Gallery are linked by the fact that, despite their differing artistic approaches, they practise a hermeneutics of suspicion towards cultural narratives that promise supposed happiness and freedom while remaining devoid of the dialectic of pain.
The sublimation of Theodor Adorno’s thought—that pain is a fracture through which the radically other enters, and that the negativity of the other turns art into a counter-narrative to the prevailing order—is, in fact, a dialectic defiant of contemporary reality. Built upon suffering as a formative experience, it ultimately leads towards truth and shapes the community of art, in which the body of art, gaining subjectivity, becomes the central theme of artistic practice. In doing so, it leads both the artists and their audiences beyond the boundaries of their own comfort.
Transgression, or transcendence, understood as an active creative act, lends credibility to the iconography examined in the paintings of each artist. At the same time, it encourages us to formulate a response to the not always explicitly stated question concerning the nature of this transformative experience.
We therefore believe that the apparent clarity and transparency of the meanings, symbols and narratives presented may naturally facilitate the reception of the paintings shown in the exhibition. However, we do not treat critical interpretations as self-evident truths. They merely reconstruct a particular narrative, arrange its individual elements into a meaningful structure, identify their sources and reveal the logical—or perhaps questionable—relationships between the statements being made. Ultimately, however, it is the viewer who stands alone before the living body of art, experiencing all its beauty and the emotions it awakens…
“To have religion is to contemplate the universe, and the value of your religion depends on the manner in which you contemplate it and on the principle you discover in its workings.” This famous and widely recognised statement by the German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), regarded as the founder of modern universal hermeneutics, may also be applied to a critical description of the contemporary field of art.
The universalism of understanding discussed by Schleiermacher also gives art a social dimension. We should therefore agree with the Berlin-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who argues that today, as we compulsively repair our own souls—but not the sacred—we lose sight of an affirming social context. The contemporary crisis of social narrative, manifested in the widespread affirmation of group-centred, egoistic well-being, leads to the atrophy and powerlessness of the language of contemporary art. Such art rejects negativity and forgets that pain can purify, while a culture governed by the “like” button offers no possibility of catharsis…
(Excerpt from the critical essay)
Curator: Andrzej Pawełczyk