Ewa Walawska
DOMINIKA SADOWSKA
POLAND

The polish city of Lodz may have a difficult name for foreigners to pronouce, but the city did indeed contribute to the creative background of the young artist Dominika Sadowska, who graduated from the Dept. of Graphic Arts and Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, in 2001. The city is aso host to the Polish Cinematography Center which has played an important role in the city's artistic environment and has influence on the creation of the Polish avant-garde. It is here that Dominika Sadowska's artistic adventure emerged, exploring the boundries of photography and the graphic arts medium. Her additional studies at the International School of Make-Up in Warsaw have also directed her attention toward the face, and sensitized her to the variability of it's expression.
Dominika Sadowska's three female portraits within the Network Baltic framework are taken from known Renaissance paintings and transformed trough photo techniques utilizing a pinhole camera. This process allowed her to extract images and to recontextualize them whereby she assigned them new meanings. Beautiful and soulful faces from portraits are brought to light from the dark backgrounds, in the manner reminiscent of the tenebroso painting technique that was popular in the second half of the XVI century in Italy. In this subtle dialogue with traditional art, Dominika Sadowska focuses her attention to the inner light of the images which, liberated from their accessories, exist ad infinitum?
The works of Dominika Sadowska are not titled, as though her images, so transitory and mysterious in their presence, need no further definition. The portrait series consist of seven works which she has chosen to be printed, using the silkscreen medium, which she deemed to be the most suited to translate the properties of painting into the language of graphic art.

Ewa Walawska
PROFESSOR, POLISH COORDINATOR OF NETWORK BALTIC

Copyrights - the artists, textwriters, photographers and Grafikens Hus

44_nb-okladka.jpg
 catologue - cover     
44_network-baltic-przod-2.jpg