Emilia Kina at Raster

Emilia Kina’s pain­tings com­bine erudition and aesthetic appeal. Their sour­ces are in lie in the theory of pain­ting and depic­tion, but the essence lies in the relations between painting/image and painting/object. Here the Renais­sance metaphor coined by Leon Alberti of the pain­ting as a window takes on an intriguing con­tem­porary form. Kina’s pain­tings call to mind screens, cur­tains and blinds, which like a room divider con­ceal the view. The figure of the window is treated here literally as a material frame, more an element of stage design than a frame from reality.

Equally impor­tant is the allusion to 19th-century studio photography. Pain­ted views and drapery were used as a back­drop for por­trait photos. This analogue engineering for con­struc­ting illusions par­ticularly interests the artist. Focusing on the mar­gins of depic­tion, of what is merely a frame for the proper view, what hides it or merely appears, Kina develop intriguin­gly her own programme for a new iconoc­lasm. Her relief com­positions, painting/screens cap­tivating in their material beauty, divert atten­tion from the digital inflation of images and mes­sages. In their place, they restore atten­tion to a dimen­sion of gazing that is intimate and free of violence.

Emilia Kina (born 1990) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2015. She has regularly exhibited since then, among other things executing joint projects with Filip Ryb­kow­ski. Her works have joined the col­lec­tion of the National Museum in Gdańsk. The exhibition at Raster is the artist’s first individual show in Warsaw.