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 chooses to instead look towards a more multidisciplinary and open approach.
Bartis creates the feeling of us almost being to step into the world that they have 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.
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).
