Alicja Pakosz
Forever Yours

Exhibition dates: 8 June — 8 July 2023
Office Baroque, Antwerp

Forever Yours

Forever Yours is the first exhibition by Polish artist Alicja Pakosz at Office Baroque. The exhibition will be on view from June 8 thru July 8 at our gallery on Everdijstraat in Antwerp and will run concurrently with an exhibition by American artist Robin Graubard.

Forever Yours is about Love, a feeling that is both unique and eternal. The iconography of the exhibition ranges from images of sunset to material metaphors like honey and amber. Honey and amber, like the sun, are gold colored substances that seem to set Forever Yours against a warm glowing background.

The painting “Forever Yours” reveals a set of perfect, yellow colored teeth. It is often said, when describing the beginning of a relationship, that it all started because of someone’s beautiful smile. Here the smile is transformed into something everlasting, frozen in a painting. Toothpaste purity has made room for the translucent yellow of amber. These are amber teeth that contain fossilized insects preserved for millions of years in solidified resin.

Honey covers the sharp blade of a knife in the painting “Honey”. Love, despite all its sweetness and euphoria, carries the risk of a great danger such as heartbreak and solitude. The cutting of ties, symbolized by the knife’s blade, speaks to us of deceit, of something coming to an end in a violent way, sugar coated for our eyes. Honey could depict a breakfast scene instead of divorce, or both.

In another painting an amber is held against the sunlight or rather against a green landscape with utility poles. The gemstone contains an unusual scene: a couple watching the sunset or sunrise on a beach. Where we would expect the couple to sit on a beach behind the stone, the stone is held inside the palm of a hand, making it impossible to see through. The couple is inside the amber, like figures in a snow globe.

The habit of carving names in tree bark to eternalize love, like tattooing on the skin of nature, often in secret places only known by lovers, is referred to in a painting of a large spruce that gazes out with its branches and smiles with a large, wide cut in the bark. This wound is an integral part of amber’s origins: resin will soon flow from the wound and solidify to protect the tree from bleeding.

Previous exhibitions by Pakosz, in a similarly uncanny way, have addressed the human body as a site of discomfort, connection as well as solitude. Images of touch, of cutting and of realities that are set behind glass. As spectators we are cut off from the potential tragedy that is about to unfold. It is this sense of helplessness before the tragedy of the world that is about to unfold, the inability to move, to act, that characterizes Pakosz’ work.

In as much as the paintings in Forever Yours try to speak to us about love, affection, they also inevitably touch upon heartache, separation and ultimately death. Love is presented here as a memory, an echo from the past, a promise perhaps not kept.

About Alicja Pakosz

Alicja Pakosz (born 1996) is from Tychy and studied at the art academies in Kraków and Nuremberg. She practises painting and spatial elaborations of painting in the form of installations and dioramas. To date, she has held individual exhibitions at Raster, Warsaw, Galeria Piana in Kraków, the Kronika Centre for Contemporary Art in Bytom, and the Gdańsk City Gallery (together with Wiktoria Walendzik).