Difficult times are coming. The catastrophe is near, yet we are busy achieving things we do not need, running together anywhere in noise and strain. We do it because we fear the unknown and want to forget it. Once again, we need the artist to lead us through deep circles of hell, to face the unknown and find the right path to be saved. This is an eternal challenge.
The human condition is a miserable fate in Beata Bigaj‘s paintings. Whether she studies confrontation between people and their emotions, humans and machines, or human versus nature, there is tension, uncertainty and screeching – it is not a sublime, pleasant vision. Instead, there is a struggle on her canvas.
Even the pastel, pale colours in the background are like a chaotic, dangerous dance. There is nothing to calm us down or make us happier. Strong emotional turbulences blur our minds.
With Beata Bigaj’s paintings, as if invited by the words of Dante, we enter a space to abandon any hope. We immerse ourselves in dissonance while everything around us is vibrating and chaotic, colliding, cumulating anxiety. Movements blurred, natural size figures and shapes. The artist surrounds us with deformed faces and grimaces. We are in a crowd of sensations, expressions, movements, gestures, and reactions. As we suffer here, we cannot escape or make a better solution because no choice would be better.
Human hardship relates to doubts, uncertainty in choices, and difficulty in judgments and decision-making. The artist urges us to see unearthly pain, misery, suffering and shame. There is no place to cover them or dress. She wants us to watch them without judging or explaining, only to face and feel. It also asks us to be involved and to abandon obstacles that keep us from that: aesthetics, shame, and disgust.
Beata Bigaj’s expressionism is alive, intense, and explosive. She is also a unique, honest and unstoppable observer. She uses rich tools to reflect her humanist messages on canvas.
Her work is based on the real or the imaginary scenes, remembered situations, transformed, deepened and worked out. The aim is not to focus on the appearance of the painted subject or person but on the conception that it embraces or empowers human values and feelings, and it is a passage to reshape our minds.
The artist once mentioned that the best reward for her work is to see a glimmer of emotion or a tear in someone’s eye. I also saw such a tear in the eye of an elderly gentleman, the lover of classics, standing long vis-à-vis an enormous buzzing brutalist-like canvas of Beata Bigaj.
Beata was born in 1972. She graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (Poland) in 1997.
She is active in paintings and graphics and a lecturer at the Jesuit University in Krakow. She has presented her works at numerous individual and group exhibitions (including many broader painting presentations). Her paintings and graphics are present in several galleries and museum collections (the J.J. Haubenstock Collection in the National Museum in Krakow, the Museum of the Polish Army in Warsaw, and the Frissiras Museum in Athens). She received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (1994), Grants from the Polish Ministry of Culture (2008, 2017) and a Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis (2024). She is a member of the International Arts Society Focus Europa, a member of ZPAP (Polish Visual Artists Association), and the co-creator of the Kontrapost Arts Society in Poland.
See also: www.beatabigaj.pl
