Beata Bols. Art and Evacuation

The Art and Evacuation exhibition is an extensive presentation of Beata Bols’s paintings and digital photography from over the past decade.

The thirty-five acrylic paintings featured here are the quintessence of the artist’s work. Nearly monochromatic and abstract, they bear equivocal titles, suggesting ties to reality or evoking metaphorical interpretations; yet they have chiefly evolved from working with vision and form. What Beata Bols paints seems to hold a remote echo of abstract Expressionism. We see the brush strokes, the dripped and layered paint. We see the solidity of the tools she uses, the mechanical stencils. Yet this is not a painting of muscle and gesture; the effect of “randomness” is only superficial. Above all, we have the famous “eye at the tip of the brush” described by Władysław Strzemiński. Forms emerge and become intentional. What we see might be given a title to trigger various associations, but these are still primarily visual shapes, colors or the lack thereof, light and darkness, “with no effort at intellectual manipulation,” as the author writes.

This visual approach is seen even more clearly in the digital photography series. Beata Bols mainly takes urban photographs. All the time. While moving about, traveling, walking, peering through the windows of buildings or vehicles, riding in an elevator, walking up stairs, resting. Some photographs are fragmentary, as if accidental, unfinished, or blurred. In a world when many people document their lives in a thousand ways on social media, this seems to be common practice. Yet in Bols’s hands, the camera mainly records things, and what its mechanical eye “sees” the artist then multiplies, repeats, makes abstract, sometimes through enlargement or close-up. These compositions may be complemented with images of what reality had to offer, such as architecture or people, though reduced to shapes or colors. The result is collages which are effortlessly aesthetic. These are raw combinations of images, impressions turning into geometrical compositions, sometimes even a kind of conceptual photography. In a similar fashion, the artist has created a series of selfies and collages made from them.

Beata Bols (primo voto Olszewska), an artist tied to Wrocław, graduated from her local Academy of Fine Arts and for many years worked in film as a widely recognized costume designer. From the mid 1980s and throughout the 90s this was her main form of expression, sometimes joined with performance, installations, object art, and painting, partly at the Szalona Masarnia Gallery. She only returned to the visual arts for good in the 2000s. From the end of the 2010s she also grew interested in photography and digital graphics. Alongside painting, these have slowly begun to dominate her work.

Beata Bols demonstrates that it is possible to be a modern artist and be successful in perfomative and ephemeral actions, as well as in painting and digital photography. This goes for abstract painting arising from a gesture, work with form and the experience thereof, and for photography, which lends itself to focusing on the visual—the essence of the fine arts. She shows that individual visual sensitivity and the effort to translate it into concrete projects with the means at one’s disposal remain important in art. Compared to the work of many young artists, with their preference for surreal motifs, sometimes hyperrealism, as well as socially engaged critical art, this turn toward the image and vision strikes us as fresh and bold. The artist has found herself at a moment on her creative path when she feels unbound by external limitations and free to make her statements. Art is the need for creative expression in life; evacuation may be a covert retreat from all that is superfluous in art.

Paulina Kurc-Maj

Beata Bols (born 1952)

Painter, photographer, poet . . . ۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥۪۪̥     . . . . . ╰────╯ . . . . . ↳ ۪۪̥˚ ͙۪۪̥꒱ ≪•◦  ◦•

: ̗➛ ׂׂ╰┈➤ ‗ ❍ ¡! . . . . . ╰────╯ . . . . . ↳ ۪۪̥˚ ͙۪۪̥꒱ ≪•◦  ◦•≫⊂ﾟU┬────┬~: ̗➛ ׂׂ

: ̗➛ ׂׂ╰┈➤ ‗ ❍ ¡! . . . . . ╰────╯ . . . . . ↳ ۪۪̥˚ ͙۪۪̥꒱ ≪•◦  ◦•≫⊂ﾟU┬────┬~: ̗➛ ׂׂ

: ̗➛ ׂׂ╰┈➤ ‗ ❍ ¡! . . . . . ╰────╯ . . . . . ↳ ۪۪̥˚ ͙۪۪̥꒱ ≪•◦  ◦•≫⊂ﾟU┬────┬~: ̗➛ ׂׂ

: ̗➛ ׂׂ╰┈➤ ‗ ❍ ¡! . . . . . ╰────╯ . . . . . ↳ ۪۪̥˚ ͙۪۪̥꒱ ≪•◦  ◦•≫⊂ﾟU┬────┬~: ̗➛ ׂׂ

scenographer, costume designer.

The exhibition "Art and Evacuation" summarizes the artist's creative activities of the last decade.