October 4 – November 3
Coulisse gallery is proud to present:‘There is no God who can keep us from Tasting’, Julia Kowalska’s first solo exhibition in Sweden and with the gallery. The exhibition takes its title from Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Book of Promethea’, a story of obsessive love in which Cixous reimagines the Genesis and the Prometheus myths – images of hunger and appetite. While revisiting the scene of the apple, she (re)negotiates the relationship between desire and law, pleasure and prohibition, and ultimately, knowledge and punishment.
Inspired by the narrative wherein satisfaction of female appetite is seen as transgression – an idea where female hunger is only acceptable if restrained – Julia Kowalska connects feminine appetite with unbridled pleasure, echoing what Cixous describes as “explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance” and “taking pleasure in being limitless”. For Cixous, female curiosity and appetite – symbolized by fruit – do not necessarily lead to humanity’s fall. Similarly, Kowalska is captivated more by the innocence behind female curiosity and desires, rather than the fateful knowledge it supposedly leads to. She goes beyond the forbidden and focuses on the fruit instead. Yet her artistic imagination seeks more than merely fruit as a metaphor for bodies. In her paintings, she combines the language of desire – appetite, pleasure, and curiosity – with a language of things, affirming, through the female gaze upon simple pieces of fruit, the joy of existing in the world and embracing one’s own desires, without being “afraid of the inside, neither of their own nor of the other’s”. She celebrates, rather than censors, women’s hunger for sexual pleasure, creativity and autonomy. Still, this celebration is not naive or simplistic. Her paintings do not follow a single narrative but are shaped by personal poetics. While referencing traditional symbolism, Kowalska modulates it according to her own desires, replacing compassion and shame with the undisturbed pleasure of female sexual self-expression.
The bodies in her paintings are depicted in their most fleshy and resilient corporeality; as if liberated from the inner voice that warns against disobedience. Delicious closeness, melting tastes, and erotic euphoria seduce with the promise of endless pleasure of looking. In her work, Kowalska often subversively plays with ambiguous gestures and unusual perspectives, making it impossible to keep a safe distance. The sensuality she creates is never straightforward; it is always tinged with an undercurrent of anxiety, a reminder of the fragility and ever-shifting nature of desire. Through this visual tension, she encourages the viewer to confront their own inner conflicts; engage them into a dialogue with paintings that are both seductive and unsettling.
In ‘and something is boiling in her, and raging, and it hurts and tickles’ there is something between deep, thick laughter, ecstasy and taking a bite. Tangled hair and gleam in the eyes, which seem to dart erratically, but aimlessly, as if staring into nothingness. The way Kowalska confronts the viewer with the raw, unfiltered aspects of female hunger evokes Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection which refers to things that society finds repulsive or threatening. But rather than evoking fear or disgust, Kowalska reclaims the abject as a source of power, creativity and transformation. The figures in her paintings seem to initiate acts of pleasure for their own benefit. They satisfy their hunger for love, pleasure, and autonomy in order to rediscover what they knew before they swallowed their rage and choked on their voices. They revel in a form of feminine jouissance – a term used by both Cixous and Kristeva to describe an ecstatic, often transgressive pleasure that combines the erotic, mystical, and political into a deeper, almost spiritual satisfaction. Thus, this pleasure exists independently – beyond the gaze, beyond language, and beyond the limitations of the patriarchal order – whether or not the viewer is looking.
Text written by Mada Zielińska
