Jagoda Bednarsky: The Self as Material, Image as Instability

At ARTEFACT Gallery, Self as Solvent by Jagoda Bednarsky reframes painting as a site of dissolution rather than construction. Opening April 24, 2026, the exhibition proposes a simple but destabilising premise: that the self, like the image, is not fixed, but constantly in flux.

Bednarsky treats painting as a solvent. Not a medium that preserves, but one that breaks down, disperses, and reconstitutes.

Her work begins with recognition. Fragments drawn from art history, popular culture, and personal memory surface within the composition. Yet they are never allowed to settle. Through repetition, distortion, and layering, these elements are pushed beyond legibility, dissolving into fields of colour and movement. What remains is not the image itself, but its residue.

This process reflects a broader condition of contemporary life, where images circulate endlessly, detached from origin and context. Bednarsky does not attempt to stabilise this flow. Instead, she intensifies it, using painterly repetition to test how meaning forms and collapses. Her reference to Jorge Luis Borges that repetition creates order lingers as both structure and paradox. Order appears, but only temporarily.

The new watercolours introduce a shift in tempo. Their scale and luminosity draw the viewer closer, inviting a slower, more intimate encounter. Yet the underlying logic remains unchanged. Forms emerge and recede, never fully resolving, leaving perception in a state of suspension.

Within the Shadowland series, this instability takes on a more pointed charge. At first glance, the compositions suggest landscapes or decorative abstractions. Gradually, another reading asserts itself. Repeated forms reveal themselves as breasts, arranged in cascading structures that blur the line between body and terrain.

The effect is disorienting. Familiar symbols of femininity and motherhood are neither affirmed nor rejected. They are reconfigured, multiplied, and abstracted, stripped of singular meaning. The body becomes pattern. The pattern becomes image. The image becomes unstable again.

Across the exhibition, themes of self-image, wellness culture, and voyeurism intersect without settling into narrative. Bednarsky constructs environments where interpretation remains open, where the viewer is required to look beyond first impressions and engage with the work over time.

This demand for sustained attention is central. In a visual culture defined by immediacy, her paintings resist quick consumption. They unfold gradually, revealing how memory, material, and perception interact.

What Self as Solvent ultimately proposes is not a statement about identity, but a condition. The self is not something to be represented. It is something that shifts, dissolves, and reforms within the images that surround it.

At ARTEFACT, painting becomes the space where that process is made visible.