Andrzej Żygadło: Full Circle

Andrzej Żygadło’s solo exhibition Full Circle presents two series of paintings: Shrine and Orthodox Church Site. The paintings draw their inspiration from his native region – today, the Polish-Ukrainian borderland. Most of the works are set in the context of historic places and events.

The leitmotifs in Żygadło’s work are landscape, architecture and figures whose images have been transferred from archival photographs. The painting compositions – based on motifs assembled from a variety of sources in a painstaking research process – coalesce into a coherent whole. For years, the artist has been collecting family histories, talking to residents of the borderlands and perusing the archives. He has created a unique method of talking about the past, depicting the difficult experiences of a population, whose culture and heritage have been systematically erased.

Andrzej Żygadło portrays landscapes bearing scars – places where absence and lack become tangible. The artist first came across a site of a destroyed church in his childhood, whilst staying in a sanatorium. The patients would take a recuperative walk along a path in Rymanów-Zdrój, which led through the area of what used to be the village of Wołtuszowa, and ran through the forest next to the site of the former Orthodox church, adjacent to the cemetery. This encounter with absence and loss, juxtaposed with the ethnographic treasures and beauty of nature of this region, became, over time, an impulse to develop a synthesising language of painting.

Andrzej Żygadło has developed a painting language that can be described as meditative. The melancholic colour palette that he uses – delicate greys, greens and blues – embeds his works in an ambiguous environment, suspended between the past and a projection of the imagination. He draws on a variety of sources – oral history, photographs, nature – which he subjects to his own painterly rigour. The motif of the destruction of the temple has a dimension of existential reflection. The search for the metaphysical element has become the predominant, unifying theme of the exhibition Full Circle.