AboUt

Conceptual painter and activist Dorota Wnuk calls her recent group of paintings her Commentary Collection. Nodding to gestural abstraction’s association with expression—an association particularly present in New York City, where Wnuk has lived since the early 1980s—she attempts to instead set up dialogues between her brushstrokes and a variety of critical global issues, indicated by titles like Supreme Court 6-to-3 Vote June 2023, Drones, Cattle or Prejudice. Engaging such topics with her painting, Wnuk harkens back to her early work made in her native Warsaw as a part of the neo-avant-garde in the late 1970s, where her activist painting practice consisted in painting over the text in newspapers as a form of protest against the censorship enacted by the Polish regime. It was thus intuitive that in a return to visual art roughly four-decades later, Wnuk concerns herself again with relationships between language and painting. Here, she asks what happens in the process of naming something, engaging the tension of what is in a title or what a title does. For some works, she thinks about a topic from which the painting takes its title, like Coal or Corn, and experiences how this form of predetermination shapes her painting. For others, she lets the brush guide her and then considers what she sees in the painting after the fact. By employing such clear titles, Wnuk invites the viewer to assess the connections between the painting and topic, perhaps picking up on links that were beyond her own intention.  No matter the linguistic or open-ended starting point, she emphasizes a directness in her painterly process by using rough, raw brushstrokes and mostly primary colors in unmixed acrylic. This materially unmediated quality introduces a kind of friction into the question of commentary, as Wnuk also seems to be after a form of immediacy–visceral engagement with what are often abstract and opaque, though urgent and pressing, topics. It’s worth noting that Wnuk’s paintings aren’t pretty: indeed beauty is the last of her concerns. Instead, she is interested in disrupting the beautiful–meddling with or defying it—so that weightier topics might take center stage.

Compositionally, Wnuk works with many layers of slashed lines–some works resemble a cross-hatch while others tangle into a dense and tumultuous web. Often working in red, black, and white, her many layers imbue some of the works with a sense of obfuscation. This obscuring process is another intriguing complication as far as the question of commentary goes. In looking at many of these works, one becomes just as aware of what is not visible, what is felt to be lurking beneath the surface, as what is seen. Wnuk’s Commentary Collection is a vibrant and bold return to painting that conveys a fervent belief in the medium as a critical form of exploratory and non-verbal communication apt for tempestuous times.

— Camila McHugh

Camila McHugh is a Berlin-based critic and curator from California.