30 September 2022 – 8 January 2023
A well-known poet and self-taught painter, Emma Andijewska believes in the creative powers of the unconscious. Her imagery evinces the desire to transcend ordinary life and to undermine logical language. In her art, as in her poetry, surrealist images emerge from the startling juxtapositions of magic landscapes, strange creatures, and ordinary objects, all brimming with awe-inspiring bright colors. Each artwork offers kaleidoscopic portraits of both the familiar and the unfamiliar, as figures shift and morph in countless ways throughout a lifetime of work-making. Gradually, Andijewska has built her grotesque, sometimes dark, universe where complex figures, naked and distorted bodies, chimeric animals, and cartoon-like characters overlap, mingle, intertwine, or multiply on sheets of paper, while some parts remain surprisingly abstract. Her vocabulary is expansive and cumulative, and stems from improvisation. Drawings range from simple images to richly illustrated pages, filled entirely with complex figures and textures. They evoke networked worlds that challenge past and present artistic canons and renew conventional ways of seeing.
This exhibition draws on the museum’s collection of Emma Andijewska’s acrylic paintings on paper, revealing her vision rooted in the marvelous and the spontaneous that closely correlates to the aesthetics of surrealism. Born in Donetsk, Ukraine, Andijewska resides in Munich, Germany.
