Galleri Nicolai Wallner is pleased to present WhileAway, a solo exhibition by Kinga Bartis. This marks Bartis’ second exhibition at the gallery.

Kinga Bartis’ approach to painting lies outside the boundaries of the classic school of the medium. Eschewing labels, Bartis envisions painting as a means of breaking free from the habitual relationship of defining and redefining of our existence—Bartis choose to instead look towards a more multidisciplinary and open approach.

WhileAway is the title of the exhibition as well as the title of the only work in the exhibition. This painting is Bartis’ largest to date, and spans the entirety of one of the gallery’s walls. Its scale gives us the feeling of us almost being to step into the world that Bartis’ has created. Repeating imagery of bodies, figures, plants, animals, natural elements and landscapes combine to reflect the realties of a shifting world. Often blending one into the other, the resulting ambiguity provides a backdrop for the aforementioned characters to ebb and flow, almost moving subtly on the canvas, revealing themselves organically.

There is an overarching idea of adaptability throughout the work, in the most positive sense. Plants, animals and human figures seem to move beyond coexistence to a state of hybridisation—adapting to new realities, new feelings, new situations, and in so doing, finding new ways of being they did not know existed beforehand.

Breaking free from conventional hierarchies and rules, markers like the stars in the sky or flowers on the ground which would normally be used to indicate how we understand position and space are intentionally dispersed. We are invited to shed our existing framework of interpreting painting and instead focus on the spaces that Bartis’ invites us—both emotionally and physically—to explore.

This feeling is echoed in the title, which is itself a reference to Joanna Russ’ science fiction novel from 1975, “The Female Man”, where Whileaway is a planet which exists in the future. For Bartis’ this reference is not an attempt to place the painting’s narrative. Rather it is an insistence that it is neither in the past, the here, or the future, but somewhere, some time.

Kinga Bartis (b. 1984, Transylvania) lives and works in Copenhagen. Bartis graduated with an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Bartis has been exhibited at Museet for Religiøs Kunst (Lemvig), Rønnebæksholm (Næstved) OK CORRAL (Copenhagen) among others. The gallery opened its first solo exhibition with Bartis in 2021. In 2022, Bartis opened a solo exhibition at TRANEN Space for Contemporary Art (Gentofte).