Joanna Mrozowska

In The Cafeteria - Contemporary Expressive Symbolic Black-White Painting

2021

Joanna Mrozowska Born in 1976 in Warsaw. Studied in the Department of Painting in the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw; she graduated with a Master’s degree in painting, with the cycle The City in 2004, under the supervision of Prof. Marian Czapla, and the annex in mural painting in the Studio of Prof. Edward Tarkowski. She took up her doctoral studies in 2015 and a PhG at the Faculty of Painting at Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2019. „The expressive drawing depiction that appears in Joanna Mrozowska’s painting is the most characteristic value of her work. It makes her paintings unique, especially since artist uses very different types of drawings and gives them different meanings. Drawings made with paint may give the impression of being sketchy, because they use a suggestive simplicity of imaging: they are usually formed by several definitely routed lines, only slightly differing in thickness. However, in this simplicity one can see a synthetic approach to the presented motif. The sings are very concise, almost like pictograms (representations of concepts), and sometimes even like ideograms (representations of ideas as ways of understanding concepts). Extensive, usually uniform color surfaces in the paintings enhance the significance of those condensed drawings by terms of contrast. The drawing depiction in Joanna Mrozowska’s painting manifests itself in characters so diverse that her paintings can be viewed together as a kind of broad spectrum of imaginary stretched between two poles: two cognitive attitudes and the corresponding to two paintings strategies. In some paintings, „visual perceptions” as I would all them, dominate, in contrast to those images in which „mental (conceptual) perceptions” take over…. (…) Looking at a set of paintings by Joanna Mrozowska makes it possible to see how from depicting real objects – the houses, the artist’s attention moves to the signs of a rather abstract nature. But we can also see this process in the opposite direction: from abstract forms of houses to realistic ones – both threads are developed simultaneously in her work. And this has its own important meaning: escaping formal divisions or limitations, while respecting the qualities of each formula used Mrozowska’s systematic undertakings make us aware of the common origin of two formulas of drawing inscribed in different paintings, images resulting from the idea of painting related to poster art” Grzegorz Borkowski Fragments of text Drawings on paintings by Joanna Mrozowska, ASPIRACJE. Quarterly of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw,