Award Winning Artist – Katarzyna Gajewska
Katarzyna Gajewska is an award winning artist born in Warsaw, Poland and has lived in Ireland for several years. Educated in Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, Gajewska is a profound painter on a mission to capture in-between realities of the human condition. Becoming an artist was a natural decision, as she grew up surrounded by paintings, poetry and sculptures. Both her parents were greatly involved in literature and visual art.
She describes her work as: ‘looking for human simplicity and complexity in the same way. I am trying to catch the casual feelings, naked and defenceless in their realism and then with understanding and patience I start to build portraits’. Gajewska’s multi layered paintings are certainly successful in portraying contradictory traits of the self. They are both romantic and brutal. She uses the word ‘build’ to describe her process this is certainly what Gajewska does so well. She makes layers upon layers, mostly with her hands, pushing and pulling the image until it is enough of both sides of the self to capture this curious inbetweeness she is fascinated with.
Gajewska captures the faces of Loie Fuller, Anais Nin, Marcel Duchamp, Bettie Page and Captain Spaulding in a series of portraits she has been painting in recent years. She describes her process as ‘grouping together like minded souls, artists, popstars, sex goddesses, working around the idea of poets and outsiders, I am showing characters that I admire’. The energetic portraits uniquely remind us of the great people the artist is inspired by.
Gajewska’s work have been exhibited widely including solo exhibitions in Gallery Chimera, Warsaw, Gallery Le Madame, Warsaw, Origin Gallery, Dublin, Cavan Arts Office, Co. Cavan, Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co Kildare, Droichead Arts Centre, Co. Dublin and Sol Art Gallery, Dublin.
When artist Katarzyna Gajewska was pregnant with her son, Antoni, her first child, she was living in Dublin, married to an Irishman, but decided she wanted to go home to Warsaw for the birth and have an elective Caesarean in a private clinic there. “Because it was my first pregnancy, and I felt paranoid and worried,” she says when I ask why. “But everyone said ‘why? You’re young, healthy, you don’t need to do this’. Eventually I stepped back; I softened, I thought, ‘OK, the hospital here is good…’ But I had a feeling something would happen. Now, I try to follow my intuition.”
Kat went into hospital when she was 40 weeks’ pregnant, in April 2011, feeling very unwell. She had what she now believes were the early signs of eclampsia, pregnancy poisoning, basically – headaches, blurred vision, high blood pressure. Although the baby’s head wasn’t engaged, labour was induced. Contractions were painful but there was no progression. After many hours, an emergency C-section was performed. Kat remembers, through the waves of pain and black-outs, looking up and seeing the doctor “holding my intestines in both hands and looking around. Blood was everywhere”. Finally, Antoni was born, by which time Kat had lost almost 1.5 litres of blood. When she fainted on day four after delivery she was given a blood transfusion. The next day, she was discharged.
And so began a nightmare. Five years and seven operations, beginning with the removal of a kidney, a year after the C-section, because it was hopelessly damaged. That followed a long period of time in which her complaints were dismissed by the various doctors she came into contact with. “I kept going to different doctors, and until I collapsed, a year after delivery, they all said I was fine. Then, it was revealed that my kidney was completely damaged, I had just 5pc of function. Until then, everyone tended to ignore my pleas – almost like I said something offensive, almost like I farted in a lovely place. I had the impression I offended everyone by saying I wasn’t feeling well. I felt almost pushed to pretend. One doctor patted me on the shoulder and said ‘maybe you should eat more’. That’s the way young women are treated sometimes.”
In all the litany of the terrible things that happened and were done to her, Kat is remarkably matter-of-fact – not bitter, or angry, although she does say, in response to my asking how she feels. “If you had asked me that question three years ago, I would have said that I am full of a lot of grief, jealousy, which I felt towards other people for whom it was just easy – they kept going, they kept living their life, and I was stuck. I felt I was punished. But you can’t go on like that, feeling this way.” In fact, the things that move her to tears as we talk are not the indifference and ignorance she encountered, but Antoni, all that he suffered because of her suffering, and the extraordinary kindness of one French doctor.
She is, she freely admits, “a completely different person now. I have lost my innocence and trust but this has been replaced with great distance and new abilities. Each moment is more real and intense now. The world has never seemed to be as desired as it is now. Thinking of its pleasures and beauty was the best method and fuel to keep going. We cannot wait to be taken by misery and death. We have to jump straight into open mouth of what is happening. The only pity is that wisdom and beauty are coming so late.”
Check her amazing work here…..
https://katarzynagajewska.com/
https://www.instagram.com/katarzyna_gajewska_work/
