Roses, roses, there are only roses
11.06.2021 — 04.07.2021
BWA Zielona Gora
Since her debut in 2001, Basia Banda creates a world in which her life and artistic
preferences, her fears, joys and reluctance all filter through. In painting, drawings, collages,
objects and photos, she tells a story about her relations with reality, which is content for
processing and usually a strange but fascinating space. She’s a mature artist who still savors
the youthly curiosity and joy of exploring new areas. Her first pieces (which she successfully
exhibited in some of the most important Polish galleries during her college years) were the
sweet and bitter story about puberty, carnality and girlhood. In those pieces the artist mainly
used the color pink which contrasted its ambiguous innocence with featured erotic situations
and physiological references, sometimes obscured by children's clothes, fragments of fabrics,
small objects.
The following cycles of Banda evolved through intermediate phases towards abstraction, in which her
interests oscillated around hybridity, biology, aesthetics of travel and tourism, but also the
passage of time and the related issue of body variability. At the same time, these pieces are
extremely attractive in their recognizable aesthetics, fascinating with the anxiety hidden under
the tempting surface. Basia Banda is born in Zielona Góra. After studying at the Academy of
Fine Arts in Poznań, she returned to her hometown and currently works at the Institute of
Visual Arts of the University of Zielona Góra, she is a doctor of fine art. The exhibition at the
BWA gallery, the title of which was taken from a song by Wanda Warska, is a summary of
twenty years of creative work, a small retrospective in which, apart from older pieces, the
newest paintings and watercolors will dominate. In a few months, a book about the art of
Basia Banda will be published, which is a summary of the extraordinary phenomenon of her
work.
Wojciech Kozłowski
Roses, roses, there are only roses
11.06.2021 — 04.07.2021
BWA Zielona Gora
Since her debut in 2001, Basia Banda creates a world in which her life and artistic
preferences, her fears, joys and reluctance all filter through. In painting, drawings, collages,
objects and photos, she tells a story about her relations with reality, which is content for
processing and usually a strange but fascinating space. She’s a mature artist who still savors
the youthly curiosity and joy of exploring new areas. Her first pieces (which she successfully
exhibited in some of the most important Polish galleries during her college years) were the
sweet and bitter story about puberty, carnality and girlhood. In those pieces the artist mainly
used the color pink which contrasted its ambiguous innocence with featured erotic situations
and physiological references, sometimes obscured by children's clothes, fragments of fabrics,
small objects.
The following cycles of Banda evolved through intermediate phases towards abstraction, in which her
interests oscillated around hybridity, biology, aesthetics of travel and tourism, but also the
passage of time and the related issue of body variability. At the same time, these pieces are
extremely attractive in their recognizable aesthetics, fascinating with the anxiety hidden under
the tempting surface. Basia Banda is born in Zielona Góra. After studying at the Academy of
Fine Arts in Poznań, she returned to her hometown and currently works at the Institute of
Visual Arts of the University of Zielona Góra, she is a doctor of fine art. The exhibition at the
BWA gallery, the title of which was taken from a song by Wanda Warska, is a summary of
twenty years of creative work, a small retrospective in which, apart from older pieces, the
newest paintings and watercolors will dominate. In a few months, a book about the art of
Basia Banda will be published, which is a summary of the extraordinary phenomenon of her
work.
Wojciech Kozłowski