Jagoda Bednarsky: Image, Repetition, and the Dissolving Self

At ARTEFACT Gallery, Self as Solvent by Jagoda Bednarsky approaches the image as something unstable, something that resists being fixed in meaning. Opening in April 2026, the exhibition brings together new paintings and watercolours that do not present narratives so much as unmake them.

Bednarsky’s practice begins with recognition and ends with its erosion. Drawing from art history, popular culture, and personal memory, she works through a process of appropriation that is deliberately unstable. Motifs surface, fragment, and dissolve within dense compositions of colour and gesture. The familiar never settles. It flickers in and out of visibility, forcing the viewer into a state of continuous adjustment.

This instability is not accidental. It reflects a broader condition, one shaped by the saturation of contemporary visual culture. Images no longer hold singular meanings. They circulate, repeat, mutate. Bednarsky’s work absorbs this excess and subjects it to painterly logic, where repetition becomes a tool not of clarity, but of tension.

Her reference to Jorge Luis Borges is telling. The idea that repetition can create order is present, but it is never fully resolved. In Bednarsky’s hands, repetition produces a fragile structure, one that threatens to collapse even as it forms.

The new watercolours mark a significant shift in scale and intimacy. Where the larger paintings overwhelm through density, these works operate with restraint. Their luminosity and fluidity suggest a different kind of attention, one that invites proximity rather than distance. Yet the same logic persists. Forms emerge only to be reabsorbed, leaving the viewer uncertain of what has been seen.

The Shadowland series sharpens this dynamic. At first glance, the compositions resemble landscapes or decorative abstractions. Gradually, the imagery reveals itself. Breasts, repeated and reconfigured, forming cascades that oscillate between the bodily and the topographical. The effect is disorienting, collapsing distinctions between subject and surface, between representation and pattern.

Here, themes of femininity and motherhood are neither fixed nor idealised. They are subjected to the same processes of repetition and distortion that shape the rest of the work. What might initially appear playful carries a more complex charge, probing how bodies are seen, consumed, and reimagined.

Across the exhibition, Bednarsky’s work engages with questions of self-image, wellness culture, and voyeurism, but it resists direct statement. Instead, it constructs environments in which meaning is provisional. The viewer is required to navigate, to look again, to question initial assumptions.

This demand for attention is central. In a culture defined by speed and surface, Bednarsky slows the act of looking. Her paintings do not reveal themselves immediately. They require time, and in doing so, they expose the instability of perception itself.

At ARTEFACT Gallery, Self as Solvent does not offer resolution. It offers a condition. One in which images dissolve, reform, and remain open.