We are surrounded by images of people. Each figure expresses some state of mental tension, since our gestures, facial expressions and gaze are always revealing.

Małgorzata Blamowska excels in depicting individuals or groups of people notable for the high intensity – even to the point of caricature – of the representations of their features and behaviour. This effect is further enhanced by the way she paints. As an artist, she perfectly controls the mental state of her characters with her brush.

The protagonists, or the main actors in her paintings, are women. The man appears as a justification or emphasis of the female state of mind. Even in her portraits of men – for example, a husband or a cardinal – she displays the conditioning of women. Her heroines fight, lust, sometimes lose, often feel helpless or fail by ‘betting on’ a man.

The painting oeuvre of Małgorzata Blamowska is a lesson – graceful and subtle, yet one that does not shy away from inflicting pain – for women who remain dependent on a man’s mood and the mechanisms he has created, from the requirement to be attractive to economic pressure or the nightmare that is war.

This painting hurts a little, but above all it fascinates with its penetrating psychic energy. The artist – immensely gentle – senses this and deliberately reduces the oppressiveness of her images by toning down their realism and surrounding the composition with expressive brushstrokes.

Maria Anna Potocka