Dimensions: 160 x 110 cm
Signature: signed on the reverse: Achtelik / 2021
Provenance
Warsaw, private collection
Exhibited
Lodz, Willa Gallery, The scent of rotting flowers, 12.09.2024-24.11.2024.
In her work, Lena Achtelik combines two realities - life before and after death. Her paintings are highly evocative and realistic in both the thanatological themes taken up, as well as those concerning cultural memory and the history of the symbol. The paintings in the Effigies series (from Latin: copy, image, likeness) are dominated by little girls in black dresses and elegantly dressed women. They emerge from the darkness like ghosts. It is not uncommon for faces to be blurred, eyes to be empty or rich clothing to be devoid of its owner, and the artist makes the attributes the main characters of the painting. Achtelik's painting resembles post-mortem photography, which becomes a field for exploring the tensions between rational and irrational areas of knowledge. By transposing old photographs into oil paintings, she works with memory. But Achtelik evokes phantoms not to bring them back to life. It is a pretext for exploring themes of interest to the artist such as transience, fragility, funeral rituals and mourning. Her paintings are a manifestation of an elementary reflection on death, in counterpoint to the prevailing culture of today, which pushes mortality out of the public consciousness.
