Anna ORBACZEWSKA (b. 1974), Nice viue, 2013

oil, canvas; 120 x 150 cm;
Signed, dated on the back and on the painter's loom: ORBACZEWSKA 2013.
Painting exhibited and reproduced: 1. Gdansk Biennale of Art, Gdansk City Gallery, 2014;
2. Then. Individual exhibition, Common Gallery, Bydgoszcz.

Anna Orbaczewska works mainly in painting and drawing, and also creates objects and murals. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague in 1998, and from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk in 1999. She is a multiple recipient of the Cultural Scholarship of the City of Gdansk, the Pomeranian Marshal's Scholarship for Cultural Creators. In 2011 she received the Bremenkunststypendium, and in 2014 she was invited to a residency at the Goa Chitra Museum, Goa India. Since 2011, she has been co-creating the Meeting Point project with Japanese artist Nobuko Hayshi, exhibited at Galerie Herold Bremen (2011) and Gdansk City Gallery (2015), among others; Orbaczewska creates her own projects in parallel to Meeting Point. The artist usually works in thematic cycles ( e.g." Real Emotions", Suspicious, Pets", "You never know anything", "That's not what I wanted to say", "Don't expect too much", "Then"). Also noteworthy are Orbachevskaya's drawings, which are created in opposition to her paintings and are an integral activity.
Major solo exhibitions: "A little wild" Milano Gallery Warsaw 2017, "Reflection" Artists' Colony Gdansk 2016, "Meeting Point (as part of the Dialogues series) - Gdansk City Gallery 2015, curated by Iwona Bigos, "Then" Common Gallery Bydgoszcz 2015, "Hidden Places" Milano Gallery Warsaw, "You never know anything".
Gdansk City Gallery 2011, curator Iwona Bigos, "Suspicious Pets" Austrian Cultural Forum Warsaw (2008), "Real Emotions 2006 CCA Laznia curator Karolina Grabowicz.
Major group exhibitions: "Grass a Kashuby" Gdansk City Gallery 2017, curator Marta Wróblewska, "Znajomi Znad Morza" - Wroclaw Market 25,July/August 2016; "Exporting Zagreb" National Museum in Gdansk, Department of Contemporary Art (Abbotsford Palace) Gdansk 2016 curator Katarzyna Kosmala, "Exporting Gdansk" Gallery Barell, Zagreb, Croatia 2015, curator Katarzyna Kosmala ; Gdansk Biennale of Art, Gdansk City Gallery 2014, Special Project Sam I am not from here, on the grounds of the Shipyard as part of the Narrations festival,Gdansk -curator Jola Woszczenko; Mayowka and Cold Modelarnia projects at Wyspa Institute of Art, curator: Grzegorz Klaman, "ad hoc model" Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdańsk-curator Grzegorz Klaman.

"(...) I see the process of creation itself as insanely important. The fascinating thing is that you can't quite predict the final result. I usually work in thematic cycles, analyzing, exploring a problem. For me, the starting point for an image is a photograph "caught" somewhere by me spontaneously and accidentally. The exception to this is the series Real Emotions and some of the images belonging to the Meeting Point project where working with someone else's material was a deliberate challenge for me. The captured photographic image hypnotizes me so much that I feel not only the need but even a compulsion to repeat it in a painterly form. In this way, I rework my emotions, feelings, thoughts that were evoked by this particular motif. (...) Painting on the basis of a photograph I took is an attempt to recall the same situation in time once again, it is a return to the past dictated by the desire to find a space outside of time. I often paint the same motif several times. I look for something different in the same representation each time. Multiplication also gives me the illusion of movement, dynamics - it brings a flat painting to life. I care about keeping mystery in the painting. Although I use the form of concrete, figurative representations what really interests me is ambiguity and indefiniteness. Allusion and elusiveness are most real and believable to me (...)."