Irmina Staś

Irmina Staś is a painter, born in 1986 in Żelechów. She studied at the Faculty of Graphics and Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and at the Painting Faculty of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts.

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Irmina Staś

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Irmina Staś, photo by Norbert Piwowarczyk

Between 2006 and 2008, she studied at the Faculty of Graphics and Painting of the Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, while in 2008-2012, at the Painting Faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, from which she graduated with distinction, having studied in the workshop of Prof. Leon Tarasewicz and Paweł Susid, PhD. She prepared her annex in Professor Mirosław Duchowski's workshop of Art in Public Space.

Irmina Staś's artistic practice exemplifies art maturing under the impact of the artist's personal experiences, which becomes a field of deep reflection and search for an original language of expression. Leon Tarasewicz, who was Staś's diploma supervisor, wrote:

It is the first time in a long, long while that I met such a young artist whose life and artistic work form such a coherent whole. Her individualism probably solidified due to a long period of isolation in hospitals. Her methodical approach to work, her analysis of the present day and the slow shift of her art towards the other side of visibility and invisibility, to the interior human world and sensations, all fuelled the development of her private painting space.

Irmina Staś, Organism 67, oil on canvas, 150 x 170 cm, 2014, photo by Adam Gut

In 2010, the artist started creating paintings (oil on canvas and watercolour on paper), which she has been consequently titling Organisms, adding consecutive numbers to respective works, as if they were specimens from a biology lab. She interprets the language of lyrical abstraction by filling large canvases with colourful compositions, which make an ambiguous and subtle reference to bodily structures, internal organs, or metabolic processes. The artist's comments on the liminal experiences associated with her illness, hint at the genesis of her paintings:

I paint situations on the borders. These situations are moments in which humans experience uncertainty and instability of their being in the world. 'In border situations humans decide on the meaning of their own existence.' Jaspers claims that only particularly dramatic experience can lead to full realisation of a human, in other words it is only in a boundary situation that a human really exists. […] My boundary situations are related to the experience of illness. Consent to subsequent surgical operations while being aware of the risk of failure were the most difficult choices in my life. Body scars are merely subtle marks compared with the memory of fear, when you are on the boundary.

The early works from the series still bore strong references to the physical nature of the body and an interference in it that causes pain and suffering. As the artist claims:

Initially, my paintings were very literal. By analytically representing specific fragments of disintegrating nature, I approached the surface of canvas as if it was an operation table.

Irmina Staś's later Organisms represent mysterious, biomorphic beings, arranged into sophisticated painted compositions which seem to be following the pulse of the internal dynamics of organic processes. Irmina Staś's painting realm, marked by her personal experience, tends towards universal issues and values, which are predominantly concerned with the impermanence and fragility of biological existence. Her more recent works, painted on white or black backgrounds, feature more abstract signs, connoting the world of natural phenomena, or even colourful ornaments. These forms coexist harmoniously, sometimes taking over the entire surface of canvas, while at other times they make subtle appearances, building the narrative in the centre of the composition. Staś has thoroughly mastered the art of painting: she uses the palette of diluted browns, greys, pinks, purples, and silverish whites with ease, maintaining a formal balance between the element of chance and controlled action.

Her Organisms (2015) series is subtitled as Transition of Matter. The artist searches in it for painterly means of expression which can depict a process that could also be interpreted in the context of alchemy, as transmutation, i.e. the transformation of base metals into noble ones.

In the catalog of the individual exhibition To Touch by Irmina Staś from 2016, Lena Wicherkiewicz described the painter's work in the following way:

Records of fascination with the phenomena of organicity and cycles of life, getting closer to what is alive, pulsating, often hidden, inaccessible to the naked or insensitive eye. recording life in its constant transformation – growth, decay, rebirth, the processes of blooming and perishing, which run in parallel as an organic continuum. There is, at the same time, a kind of combination of the untamed joy of living and anxiety about its fragility and inevitable perishing running at an individual pace

Tasteful in terms of colors and forms, composed in harmonious arrangements of the guts of the bodies, the artist usually hangs in a ‘void’ defined by white or black – used as a background for visual representations. Excellent painting created on the basis of life-giving paint and form-creating shapes, somehow in itself becomes the hero of Staś's work. Each of the paintings is another step in developing the language of painting and the potential of meanings, it also tests the limits of this means of artistic expression.

In 2016, she started executing the Bouquets – conical compositions of bones, tree branches, and leaves, inspired by natural ones, but here simplified to oblong forms. Dramatic expression and compositional affinity suggest a link with Tomasz Tatarczyk’s Piles, but in the Bouquets, sharp edges have been softened. Besides large-format oils on canvas, Irmina Staś is also an author of watercolors on paper, depicting the natural world in constant fluctuation and transgression. Rendered in delicate, fuzzy tones, forms levitate against a white (neutral) or black (dramatic) background. Confronting each other, partly overlapping, they arrange themselves into constellations and fractals, yielding connecting and disconnecting shared parts.

In Przekroje (Cross-Sections, 2018), Staś has effected a formal simplification, painting shapes familiar from nature, but without representing their details. Reducing the number of elements to halved eggs or cylinders (the “cross-sections”), the artist has focused on exploring their structure and the dialogue they conduct with each other and with their surroundings. Color has become even clearer; in use are yellows, greens, and reds, but also fleshy, near-natural tones. The oval forms have been placed on a white or black background. Executed with rather flatly applied oil paint, they resemble an ornamental textile pattern or a paper cutout collage.

Cross-Sections anticipated another series of works, Ornamenty (Ornaments, 2018–2019), which mark a turn towards reality. They also show the artist's interest in the boundaries of painting and the potential of expanding them with new tools and methods of work. Pictures and soft objects are created on the basis of repetitive ornaments with the use of a single fragment of the body multiplied in such a way that the whole composition resembles a pattern characteristic for wallpapers or textiles. In the text The limits of Irmina Staś’s painting, Agnieszka Maria Wasieczko writes:

Thinking about form and color has been combined with attention to ornamental values, where strandiness, recurrence, rhythm, spacing, and scale play the main role. […] The forms intermesh, flock together, filling empty spaces and building over the background in a delicate structure, a semi-biological tissue. Thus the artist composes her paintings, consisting of multiplied shapes in a white or black pictorial space.

Staś is interested in the significance of the ornament, which from the earliest times not only raised the aesthetic value of architecture and objects made in accordance with the principles of sophisticated artistic craftsmanship, but also carried symbolic meaning. The new works are based on body motifs and are treated as a dictionary of symbols with a wide field of interpretation. In them one can find semantic traces related to identity, genetic similarity and closeness, as well as the uncertainty of being in the world and relationships. The threads of tensions between bodies, poles and genders also resonate in the biomorphic and sensual Ornaments.

The Polish title of the exhibition, Ząb w ząb (Tooth to Tooth), is a neological phrase based on two expressions. One is ‘a tooth for a tooth’, which has its roots in the ancient Code of Hammurabi, the Babylonian code of law. The other is a Polish expression, kropka w kropkę, which translates as ‘identical, down to the last detail’. The title clearly describes the composition of Irmina Staś’s latest paintings, which are an evolution of the Ornaments series she began in 2018. It also alludes to the concepts of genetic similarity, recurrence and the inevitability of fate. The large-scale canvases, which are covered with a simplified image of a tooth multiplied in rhythmic arrangements emerging disquietingly from a black background, trigger an acute sense of annihilation, of the end of existence, though not of the human race alone, but the end of living nature. All that remains are teeth.

At the same time, the form and contrasting colouristic solutions of the paintings mean they can be considered as an op art experiment. Side by side and ‘head to toe’, the teeth seem to vibrate and create after-images. Unfortunately, the exhibition of Irmina Staś's works, which was to open on Friday, March 13, 2020, did not take place due to the restrictions imposed by the spreading of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The exhibition Powtórzenia (Repetitions, 2021) presented the painting series and textile objects by Irmina Staś, which have been created in recent years. In addition to similar meanings concerning the functioning of organic beings, their mutual dependence, genetic similarity and a feeling of the end of existence, the works Cross Sections, Ornaments and the latest series entitled Chlorophyll and Blood share the theme of repetition. In all of the series, shown in Bielska BWA Gallery for the first time and in full splendour, the artist multiplies bodily fragments and their overall images. Thanks to the figure of repetition, she obtained patterned compositions with a specific rhythm and scale, at the same time emphasizing the meanings and enhancing the message in the large images and haptic objects.

Selected solo exhibitions:

2021 – Repetitions, Bielska Gallery BWA, Bielsko-Biała
2020 – Tooth to Tooth, Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; Microcosms (with Tomasz Tatarczyk), HOS Gallery, Warsaw
2019 – Face to Face (with Paweł Matyszewski), BWA Zielona Góra, Ornaments, Le Guern Gallery, Warsaw
2018 – Cross Sections, Krynki Gallery, Krynki; Shapes & subjects, Miejski Ośrodek Sztuki, Gorzów Wielkopolski
2017 – Digging In (with Paweł Matyszewski), Le Guern Gallery, Warsaw
2016 – Touch, Wizytująca Gallery, Warsaw; Metabolism, Zachęta Project Room, Warsaw;
2014 – Organismen, Strabag Kunstforum Artlounge im Strabag Haus, Vienna
2013 – Organisms, Wizytująca Gallery, Warsaw

Selected group exhibitions:

2020 – Herbarium novum. Efflorescentiae, Galeria Miejska BWA, Bydgoszcz; A Year of Perpetual Summer, Ethnographic Museum, Warsaw
2019 – Young Polish Painting, National Museum in Gdańsk
2018 – Lejanias Works from Krzysztof Musiał’s collection, Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporania, Valencia, Spain
2017 – Body Experience Works from the Collection of Galeria Bielska BWA, Miejski Ośrodek Sztuki, Gorzów Wielkopolski; What About This Abstraction?, Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw; Through the Looking Glass, Regional Art Gallery in Jihlava, Czech Republic; HERE we are. Selected works of post-1945 Polish art from the collection of Krzysztof Musiał, CSW Toruń
2016 – Entre Sistemas. Pintura polaca contemporánea en la colección de Krzysztof Musiał, Francisco Hernandez Contemporary Art Centre, Velez–Malaga, Spain
2015 – 42nd Painting Biennale Bielska Jesień 2015 under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko-Biała; Disgust Remained. Works From Open-Air Painting Session, R5 Studio, Białystok; Power of Abstraction, Museum of Modern Art, Minsk, Belarus; Records of Changes, Our Selection from the Collection of Krzysztof Musiał, Płocka Galeria Sztuki, Płock
2014 – Mauerfall 25 Jahre. Fördergesellschaft zeitgenössischer Kunst mbH, Essen, Germany; Wątpia, Galeria Monopol, Warsaw; Open Air With Miłosz, PKO Bank Polski Head Office, Warsaw
2013 – 41st Painting Biennale Bielska Jesień 2013 under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko-Biała
2012 – National Review of Young Painting Promocje 2012, Legnica; Coming Out. Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw Graduation Exhibition 2012, Warsaw; Where is Painting? Tarasewicz and Susid’s Painting Space Studio, Galeria Atak, Warsaw; The Presence of Painting, Leon Tarasewicz’s Students, Galeria Spokojna, Warsaw
2011 – Artists to Sokrat, Jubilee of Sokrat Janowicz, Krynki

Selected awards and honourable mentions

Recipient of the grant from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2015 and 2019); finalist of the Strabag Artaward International at Strabag Kunstforum, Vienna (Austria, 2013); winner of the Art Award of the University of Arts in Poznań in the competition New Image / New Look (2013); finalist of the 11^th Geppert Competition Attention! Painting!, Wrocław (2013) and of the 41^st Bielska Jesień Painting Biennial 2013, BWA Bielska Gallery, Bielsko-Biała; recipient of the Jury's Honourable Distinction in the 22^ndPolish Young Painters Review Promotions 2012 in Legnica.

Ewa Gorządek, February 2016, transl. AM, March 2016. Updated: HSz, July 2021.

painter

contemporary painters

academy of fine arts in warsaw

władysław strzemiński academy of fine arts in łódź