At her solo-show called Uneasily Visible Place in Zahorian & van Espen Prague Natalia Załuska presents mostly new works created during this year. By the choice of several different formats of paintings and by installing one of them into space, the artist aims to introduce her work in its complexity – even in a limited room – and show it also from unexpected angles.

Załuska works with the medium of pendant image, using traditional canvas on wooden frame, but combining collage and painting techniques into multi-layered reliefs. She creates characteristic abstract compositions of geometric basic forms with decent colours (mostly black, white and pastel shades), and she’s developing sophisticated and minimalistic play of space and its illusion, surface and its demarcations.

As the artist herself explains, the main subject of her work is spatiality. She uses cardboards with various thickness, different textures and colours, cutting and layering them in a kind of constructivist way. This architectural building of an image together with the use of acrylic paint applied on some of the layers or edges, creates shades and passages. Natalia is inviting the viewer to contemplate what is exposed and what is hidden, or at least uneasily visible.

One might say that the main characteristics of her painting lies in reduction and simplicity, but there is much more happening. As Adam Budak wrote about Natalia’s work: “simultaneously nonchalant and controlled, [it] is both smooth and violent, still and conversational, minimal and neo-baroque”. Because of the various perspectives and planes, as well as the tactile or glossy qualities of different surfaces, it is in fact impossible to capture the work’s complexity in photographic documentation. These paintings deserve an active viewer and they need to be observed here and now. In a review of Natalia’s show published in Artforum (February 2016) Nuit Banai therefore decisively answers the question, what can abstraction do today: “In many ways, Załuska’s practice can be understood as an attempt to delineate a perceptual model in an age of increasingly homogenized time and space.”

Natalia Zaluska (born 1984) graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, she lives and works in Warsaw. She exhibits regularly in Vienna and Munich and she presented her work also in Madrid, Berlin or Copenhagen, among other places. In 2018 she took part in the prestigious ISCP residency program in New York and received a stipend from Ministry of Culture of Poland. In the show Uneasily Visible Place she introduces her work to the Czech audience for the first time.