Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
– Oscar Wilde
In her dramatic paintings, beauty mingles with the macabre, light shines out of darkness, mystery merges with the uncanny… Julia Medyńska creates arresting representations of human psychology disguised in a seductive costume.
The “Maskarada” exhibition in the Muzeum Ziemi Międzyrzeckiej is Medyńska’s first major show since she came back to Poland, after years spent in Berlin, London, and New York. In her homeland, she found a retreat during the pandemic, yet the theme of masking has been present in her vocabulary of leitmotifs for a long time now. As we are still getting used to wearing physical masks covering our faces for protection, Medyńska has been depicting the world of metaphorical masks. It’s a game between the private and the public image of the self. In her works, created with thick impastos and strong contrasts, she refers to the theatre, cinema, and fairy tales’ realms. She explores the world of delusions and phantoms and tries to construct alternative universes, where the good doesn’t always win.
Sometimes, Medyńska’s art reveals more than the artist intended to show us. The element of her personal life is always present, be it in her small-format portraits, her large landscapes, or her paintings inspired by the baroque masters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt or Rubens. By creating a cinematic yet sinister ambience on her canvasses, she tells us the story of conflict and violence, but also of victory and redemption.
In 1985, when she was five years old, Medyńska’s family escaped Poland and managed to start a new life in West Berlin. As the artist recalls, she lived there in a single room with her mother and her domineering grandmother, the family matriarch, who was determined to hide the family’s impoverishment. Medyńska herself tried to blend in at a prestigious private school, where she learned to “put on a mask” and hide the embarrassing reality of her home life. This inconsistency between the public and the private, between what can be revealed and must be hidden, seems to be the reason Medyńska became a painter. After high school, she moved to New York to study acting. She performed at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, a now defunct off-Broadway theatre. In 2009, however, she returned to school to earn an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University. For her, painting is like creating screenplays and directing movies – there’s a narrative for every artwork, a suspense and a mystery that the artist solves only to a certain point.
The “Maskarada” exhibition presents a wide overview of her oeuvre starting with portraits created in her London studio of people wearing all kinds of masks, through scenes inspired by Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales, to her latest landscapes and genre scenes inspired by 17th-century paintings. They are all influenced by Medyńska’s acting background. She examines the dissonance between the artificially created social persona and the personal psychologically true identity.
In her portraits from 2019, either based on vintage black and white photographs or film stills, such as “Chin Strap”, “Bandages or Masquerade #2”, the artist shows us the static faces of men trapped in masks – silenced and immobilized, in a situation of oppression. Nowadays, these are works that we can easily identify with – especially as Medyńska does not reveal the identity of the portrayed and treats them rather as archetypes. The faces are partially covered, their features are only slightly suggested and blurred.
Working with dark tones, Medyńska has a special approach to light – she achieves the bright colours by removing the black paint previously applied to the entire surface of a canvas. This way, her paintings are bathed in darkness, evoking uneasiness, even arousing anxiety. Even so, in the series of paintings based on fairy tales such as “The Big Bad Wolf” or “The Witch”, she reaches for a wider colour palette and shows us the alternative versions of the popular stories – Little Red Riding Hood becomes a strong girl who fights back the bad wolf, and an old ugly witch becomes a lovely child.
The latest collection of paintings inspired by the baroque masterpieces is the most self-referential. Medyńska focuses here on appropriation and converts the refined artworks into narratives about dramatic gestures, restless bodies, about lust and decay. Here, as in “The Tree of Life” inspired by Rubens’ “The Fall of Man”, she uncovers the curtain of superficial beauty and shows the aftermath of the events with all the consequences – the chaotic and gloomy reality.
Julia Medyńska extracts images from darkness, but at the same time reveals the true nature of things. She observes the world with all the glitz and glamour, with powdered faces and staged poses, only to strip it all from its masks… Her paintings are formally uncompromising, yet they attract the viewer with an inner charm.
Magdalena Zięba-Grodzka
Magdalena Zięba-Grodzka – PR and marketing manager, design manager, art and design writer. She collaborates with Zieta Studio, as well as LABEL, Living and Rynek i Sztuka magazines. Her essays and critical texts appeared in several scientific publications, as well as in magazines such as Archivolta, Artluk, Obieg, Szum, Exit. In the past, she collaborated with the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw and ArtTransparent Foundation, among others.
