AGATA KUS
Kus primarily paints people, consistently with the current triumphant return to this classic type of figurativeness. Her trademark use of multiple narratives within a single composition allows a multi-faceted reading of the painting as individual themes or a synthesis of them all, resulting in new meanings. The elusiveness and ambiguity of Kus’s paintings offers many possibilities for interpreting and following their complex narratives. The artist uses a wide range of formal procedures such as pictorial collage, pseudo-cutouts, paste-ins, obliterations and destructions to suggest a juxtaposition of many differently textured and executed compositions.
Twins, repeated portraits, mirror images of characters, double portraits, where people look with glassy and sometimes with burnt-out eyes, immersed in thought, absent, joined at the shoulder like Siamese twins – all of them recurrent in the artist’s work – intrigue and disconcert the viewer. One cannot help but recall here Identical Twins by the photographer Diane Arbus or the famous twins from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and the way they influence our visual associations related to twins. Kus’s work also makes us instinctively look for differences between the twins. They are painted flatly and clearly, in sharp and sterile light.
Agnieszka Gołebiewska