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Exhibitions

Julia Kowalska

"There is no God who can keep us from Tasting "

Coulisse Gallery Stockholm
October 04,2024 - November 03,2024
And something is boiling in her, and raging, and it hurts and tickles, 2024, oil on canvas, 60x90 cm.

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 

And something is boiling in her, and raging, and it hurts and tickles, 2024, oil on canvas, 60x90 cm.
And something is boiling in her, and raging, and it hurts and tickles, 2024, oil on canvas, 60×90 cm.
Sigtunagatan 15
Stockholm, 113 22
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