Mademoiselle — Solo Show d’Agata Kus — Maëlle Galerie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 14 → June 4, 2016

Kus primarily paints people, consistently with the current triumphant return to this classic type of figurativeness. Her trademark use of multiple narratives within a single composition allows a multi-faceted reading of the painting as individual themes or a synthesis of them all, resulting in new meanings. The elusiveness and ambiguity of Kus’s paintings offers many possibilities for interpreting and following their complex narratives. The artist uses a wide range of formal procedures such as pictorial collage, pseudo-cutouts, paste-ins, obliterations and destructions to suggest a juxtaposition of many differently textured and executed compositions.

Agata Kus, Twins IV, 2015 Oil on canvas, cigarettes holes — 41,3 × 51,1 in Courtesy of Maëlle Galerie, Paris

Twins, repeated portraits, mirror images of characters, double portraits, where people look with glassy and sometimes with burnt-out eyes, immersed in thought, absent, joined at the shoulder like Siamese twins — all of them recurrent in the artist’s work — intrigue and disconcert the viewer. One cannot help but recall here Identical Twins by the photographer Diane Arbus or the famous twins from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and the way they influence our visual associations related to twins. Kus’s work also makes us instinctively look for differences between the twins. They are painted flatly and clearly, in sharp and sterile light.

— Agnieszka Gołebiewska

Agata Kus, HE TAKES MOVIES VERY SERIOUSLY, 0 Oil on canvas — 41,3 × 51,1 in Courtesy of Maëlle Galerie, Paris

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Agata Kus (1987), a graduate and a PhD student of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. She works in painting, video and performance. She completed her diploma at the studio of Professor Leszek Misiak (2012) was an as- sistant at the atelier of Paulina Ołowska (2010-2014). Recipient of many awards and scholarships, including the Grand Prize at the International Media Art Biennale WRO 2015 in Wrocław for the multi-screen video installation Mistress. Her paintings are in the collection of the MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow and in many private collections in Poland and abroad.

Agata Kus, BRAWLS, SHINERS, BLACK AND BLUE, 2015 Oil on canvas — 19,6 × 23,6 in Courtesy of Maëlle Galerie, Paris