Pełzaże Iwony Zawadzkiej
The cycle of paintings “Crawlscapes” by Iwona Zawadzka intrigues the viewer with sophisticated form and content. The title is a funny play on words, a combination of the word landscape with the action of crawling and prowling. The cycle is composed of a series of self-portraits and representations of mountain views, which appear in the artist’s work for the first time. The painter searched for inspiration in Californian Death Valley and among snowy Himalayan peaks. A common denominator for both series can be found in rhizome-like forms, activating energetic fields in space and creating potential tensions. Vivid, easily changing scale, they entangle and drag the represented female figure into their structures. Genetically, they are derived from Lamaism, introducing, moreover, an aura of esotericism and occultism. A testimony to this are, first of all, the titles of the works, like „The Elementals”, or “The Grey Tigle”, which mean the spiritual powers of the elements or strong states of concentration of conscience, capable of generating inner projections. The pale, ethereal figure of the woman is shown in the paintings in this kind of trance, perhaps in one of the phases of sleep. Disconnected from reality, she is more of her own double than a real woman.
Iwona Zawadzka’s paintings give us aesthetic and intellectual pleasure. The artist has managed to successfully combine creation with studying inner states of conscience and contemporary spirituality. The “Crawlscapes” cycle is a record of the artist’s development process, to which she invites us in a very subtle way.