Agata Slowak’s Personal Jesus

The 28-year-old Polish artist Agata Slowak informed the writer and curator Alison Gingeras, who ready the press elements for Slowak’s present at Fortnight Institute, that she “wanted to queer Jesus.” Her paintings are complete of nails and stigmata — surreal, sadomasochistic illustrations or photos that depict male spoil and female ability. Slowak wrote to me that she, a youthful woman in a Catholic place, occupies a “rupturing posture.” She extra, “I discover it hard to operate in communities in typical.”

From the Cycle, White Balls on the Wall provides us an icon of neurotic obsession. A woman’s hand retains a penis, exposing its underside. Nails are pushed as a result of just about every of her fingertips, affixing them to it like the savior to his cross and creating a trickle of blood. All-around the wrist there is a bracelet with a cross as its clasp.

Slowak’s system is partly classical. We think of the early Renaissance and Romanticism and Cranach, but also the kitsch-modernism of Picabia and the hyperrealist photos of masturbation by Christian Schad. Slowak is painting her like daily life, her fantasies, and the murky evening earth of her wish. Gingeras calls it “auto-psychoanalysis.”

Artwork: Courtesy of the artist, Foksal Gallery Foundation and Fortnight Institute, New York. Photograph by Jason Mandella

In You Were being Cold in My Shadow, a naked couple stands in entrance of a burning setting up. The gentleman is missing an eye, which is located in the woman’s mouth. He licks at it, as if to say, “This is mine. I want it back again.” He is balding, effeminate, extended, slim. She is in control, gazing at the viewer. It’s a photo of dismemberment and defilement and decadence, although the couple exudes a unusual perception of comfort.

In Self Portrait With Sperm and Blood Crossing, Slowak is seated, posed like some tutorial nude. A person ejaculates at her. She raises her suitable palm an arc of blood spurts from it, forming a neat cross of crimson and white, a double stigmata. Listed here is equally attraction and avoidance fused into just one flesh. She is frozen in area, staring at us. Her ambivalence speaks to the means all of us come to be caught in styles pushed by inner requirement and mad longing.

Sperm Flooded the Mind is a lurid indictment: a portrait of Slowak with the top rated of her skull open to reveal her mind coated in dripping sperm. Evidently, the mom of her ex-boyfriend would convey to her, “You have sperm on the mind.” What a strange expression. Listed here, Slowak gets a carnivorous flower, seductive, evil, a death’s head.

These times, artists normally crawl into more mature variations of portray and inject them with new electrifying topic make any difference. Cecily Brown repurposes de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist nudes by adding ladies and unfamiliar narratives Lynette Yiadom-Boakye uses the operate of the Eight, an early-20th-century movement, to develop incredible scenes of everyday Black existence Betty Tompkins provides Chuck Close’s photorealism to scientific element, zeroing in on dicks in vulvas. These interventions are coming from women of all ages, men and women of coloration, and other underrepresented artists.

Slowak stands out in this regard, and her use of old kinds is not just aesthetic. Lousy Fetus reveals a bloody head rising from her vagina. An abortion, in other phrases, which can place you in jail in Poland. She appears to be to be declaring that there is continue to medieval horror in the fashionable globe.