Nassauischer Kunstverein

Jagoda Bednarsky

19 Jan - 02 Aug 2015

Jagoda Bednarsky
Vltava, 2014
oil and varnish on book cover
© and Courtesy Philipp Pflug Contemporary, Courtesy: Private Collection Frankfurt am Main
JAGODA BEDNARSKY
Synopsism
19 June - 2 August 2015

The painterly imagery of the graduate of the Städelschule Jagoda Bednarsky (*1988, in Goldberg, PL). deals with questions of layering and planes of localization: What is in the image? What is behind the image? What is in front of the image? She utilizes technically re- produced graphics or photographs she comes across in magazines, photobooks, on the Internet as well as in everyday and artistic visual culture using them as objets trouvés, in this way extending the images intrinsic logic. The images thus serve as her starting point in terms of both content and form. In their capacity as found objects, the image sources (which frequently reference the actual venue for the exhibition) initially relate firmly to reality. With collaging and ove rpainting found and invented material, a seemingly accidental and mystical synthesis of ambivalent realities emerges, offering multiple perspectives and mutually permeating levels of images.

Bednarsky also uses reflections, serial repetitions, duplications and cross-references as means of visual representation, such that in her search for an inherent link between information and knowledge the paintings exude a mysterious auratic mood. For the exhibition at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, the aspect of reflection is being transferred on the spacial structure of the exhibition.

The systematic, institutional archiving of human knowledge has long been a reference point for Jagoda Bednarsky – an endeavor which implicitly questions the inflexibility of standardized perception. This interest proceeds in the cinematic principle of using found footage to tell stories and applying information and imagery, which reveals itself in her book spine paintings: She links the book’s content, its “intrinsic knowledge”, with the painting on the cloth back. This is ultimately an advancement in three dimensions of the question described at the beginning as to how levels of images can be pinpointed on the inside and outside – between knowledge and information.