Jagoda Bednarsky Pulls Identity Apart And Puts It Back Together

At ARTEFACT Gallery, Jagoda Bednarsky is not presenting fixed images. She is working through something far less stable, where identity shifts, breaks, and reforms depending on how long you stay with it.

Self as Solvent is built on a simple but demanding idea. The self is not solid. It absorbs, dissolves, and reconfigures constantly, shaped by everything it encounters. Bednarsky approaches painting in the same way. Images are pulled from art history, popular culture, and personal memory, then stripped back and reassembled until they no longer behave as they originally did.

What appears familiar at first does not stay that way. Motifs surface briefly before being folded back into dense layers of colour and gesture. There is no clean separation between reference and abstraction. Everything exists in transition, caught somewhere between recognition and disappearance.

This sense of instability is pushed further in the new watercolours presented here. Lighter in material but not in intent, they hold the same tension between clarity and distortion. Works from the Shadowland series sit at the centre of this shift. At a distance, they read as landscapes or decorative forms. Spend more time with them and the structure changes. Repeated shapes begin to register as parts of the body, arranged in ways that feel both deliberate and slightly disorienting.

The repetition is not accidental. It builds rhythm, but it also disrupts it. Patterns form, then break apart, then return again in altered form. It is a way of creating order without ever fully resolving it, drawing on the idea that repetition can construct meaning even as it unsettles it.

Across the exhibition, themes of femininity, motherhood, and self image move in and out of focus. They are present, but never fixed in one interpretation. There are fragments of theatre, hints of design, traces of something staged but never fully revealed. The work resists a single reading because it is not built to hold one.

That is where it becomes most effective. It does not tell you what to see. It asks you to stay with it long enough for something to emerge.

Self as Solvent runs from April 24 through June 25 in Berlin. It is not an exhibition that gives everything at once. It reveals itself slowly, and only if you are willing to look past the surface.