2018-2025
Effigies are inspired by conventional portrait photographs of nineteenth-century people, mostly nameless women and children. These paintings, apart from interest in dark romanticism and the incredible expression of mourning at that time, derive from the statement that we are still in the Victorian era. We are facing the problems and effects of industrialization, production, urbanization, the emergence of scientific disciplines, faith in technology, discovering the death of the ‘other’, while simultaneously removing it from the margins of everyday life.
Experience of death is an anthropological catalyst for the making and understanding of images. These portraits are also a reflection on the copy, the double, the reproduction, the image replacing the real, absent body (effigium) and the perceived materiality of the medium. That physical presence of the absent that haunts us, is crucial to an idea of the image.
Effigies are inspired by conventional portrait photographs of nineteenth-century people, mostly nameless women and children. These paintings, apart from interest in dark romanticism and the incredible expression of mourning at that time, derive from the statement that we are still in the Victorian era. We are facing the problems and effects of industrialization, production, urbanization, the emergence of scientific disciplines, faith in technology, discovering the death of the ‘other’, while simultaneously removing it from the margins of everyday life.
Experience of death is an anthropological catalyst for the making and understanding of images. These portraits are also a reflection on the copy, the double, the reproduction, the image replacing the real, absent body (effigium) and the perceived materiality of the medium. That physical presence of the absent that haunts us, is crucial to an idea of the image.
oil paintings on canvas
Project was presented at numerous solo and group exhibitions including:
Blackbody radiation at Widna Gallery, Kraków, Poland (https://restartmag.art/lena-achtelik-promieniowanie-ciala-doskonale-czarnego-w-galerii-widna/)
Discomfort of evening at Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (https://zacheta.art.pl/en/wystawy/niepokoj-przychodzi-o-zmierzchu-the-discomfort-of-evening)
Paint also known as blood. Women, affect, and desire in contemporary painting at Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (https://farba.artmuseum.pl/pl/artysta/lena-achtelik)
Project was presented at numerous solo and group exhibitions including:
Blackbody radiation at Widna Gallery, Kraków, Poland (https://restartmag.art/lena-achtelik-promieniowanie-ciala-doskonale-czarnego-w-galerii-widna/)
Discomfort of evening at Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw (https://zacheta.art.pl/en/wystawy/niepokoj-przychodzi-o-zmierzchu-the-discomfort-of-evening)
Paint also known as blood. Women, affect, and desire in contemporary painting at Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (https://farba.artmuseum.pl/pl/artysta/lena-achtelik)