Justyna Kisielewicz’ delves into colonial trauma for her Untitled debut
- 4 days ago
- 1 min read
Born in Soviet-occupied Warsaw, Miami-based artist Justyna Kisielewicz’s paintings brim with multi-layered, socio-political references, humor, and kaleidoscopic colors. Her work will be shown for the first time at the Untitled fair during Art Basel Miami Beach after a busy year that includes five group exhibits in Paris, Warsaw, Miami and Bogota plus two solo shows. As an Eastern European living in sunny Miami, she personifies Untitled's 2024 curatorial focus of East meets West.
Behind the pastoral scenes of imminent climate catastrophe in her paintings lies a biting critique of colonialism from someone who experienced the repressive Russian occupation firsthand. As she says, “I was born into slavery,” a fact that makes her attuned to the trauma of colonialism. Color and American toys were her escape amidst the drabness of Soviet brutalist architecture. Even her choice of crayon colors was repressive- she had 8, and the current U.S. box contains 120.
The themes in her new work, like the painting Blood Lands pictured above, delve into colonial Eastern European history and the “meeting” (invasion) of the West by tying it into scenes of the colonization of the Americas (see Spanish armada ships and conquistadores center right). Also, in the middle of the composition by the tongue of the snake the artist has included herself being stabbed by a soldier as her intrepid pomeranian Charlie Brown attempts to save her, a symbol of how her life’s trajectory was forever altered via the war and what happened to her family and Poland. (Many members of her family were killed during the Holocaust).
