Solo Exhibition: Somnium at Villa Decius
Somnium brought together work I made over several years and across different series, shown for the first time in one place and in a Polish context. The pieces had travelled separately before, to the United Kingdom, China and the United States. At Villa Decius they finally hung side by side, together with unpublished work and new pieces made during my residency at the villa.
What holds these images together is light. I build it the way it is built in Baroque painting, so that a single source carves the figure out of the dark and leaves the rest of the scene in shadow. The scenes are staged and quiet. Each one keeps a symbol at its centre that points further than the motif itself, toward something the picture does not fully show. Light and shadow do the work of saying what stays hidden.
The images sit where Slavic mythology meets the European painting tradition. I draw on folk figures and old beliefs on one side and on the craft of the old masters on the other, and I let them meet in the same frame. The result is oneiric rather than illustrative. These are dream-images built out of light, closer to a remembered scene than to a documented one.
Placing the work in Kraków, and inside a Renaissance villa, changed how it read. Villa Decius is a house with its own long memory, and the walls gave the pictures a setting that matched their register. The residency let me make new work in that place rather than bring everything ready-made, so part of the exhibition was made in dialogue with the villa itself. Seeing years of separate series resolve into one room was the part that mattered most to me.
Somnium ran at the Institute of Culture Villa Decius (Willa Decjusza) in Kraków from 3 September to 18 October 2026, with the opening on 3 September, as part of the institution's thirtieth anniversary programme.
Photography by: Michał Małecki.
