The headless giantesses are afraid to sleep alone, their bodies large, powerful and fragile at the same time. Ambivalent and non-normative oddities. They carry their own little portraits in their hands and look at them lovingly, as if they were their own children. They walk with a pack of ratter dogs under their feet, because only then do they feel safe. In the evening they peel off the heavy layers of their skins, their everyday shells, revealing their delicate insides – scratches, bumps and imperfections. Peek behind the curtain to see their soft, delicate underbellies. Hear them sob and giggle endlessly. The headless giantesses are full of living creatures – bats and panthers, their fangs, claws and jaws. They don’t need heads. They are driven by affect.

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Maja Krysiak worked on her latest series of paintings headless. The large, austere canvases and drawing techniques forced her to search for an authentic gesture and bodily application of paint. The finished composition was created in one go. The artist allowed herself to be carried away by a therapeutic and meditative process. She dared to trust herself and her intuition without preparing sketches or drafts. This creative method taught her to be present in the here and now and to accept that once a line is drawn or a wrong move is made, it cannot be undone. In the creative process she tried not to think but to go with the flow, leaping across the canvas like a circus tightrope walker. The new technique and materials led her to abandon traditional oil painting. The slow-maturing technique allowed her to clown around, to make corrections, to rethink, to make changes and to hide them under layers of painterly skin. In ‘Headless Giants’, on the other hand, the artist explores attentiveness, honesty and pure emotion. An essential aspect of these works is their scale and installative nature, which compel the viewer to make certain movements – lying down, rubbing or touching. Against the prevailing ocularcentrism, Krysiak turns to the senses, and the bodies of the giantesses become radars of emotional states. 

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Dreams play a very important role in the artist’s work, as she has been carefully documenting them for years and using them as the primary inspiration for her painterly compositions. Dreams allow her to delve into the subconscious, search for archetypes and construct vivid metaphors. Reality and dream are seamlessly intertwined in her work. She finds their afterimages in everyday activities, like imprints on a pillow. Her work revolves around themes of onirism, magic and surrealism. For years, Krysiak has built her artistic imagination and metaphorical language around the figure of a travelling circus full of human and animal oddities – dwarves, giants, clowns, acrobats and wild, exotic creatures. She sees them as Foucauldian heterotopias, ‘other’ places that operate according to their own rules. The vibrant colours and dynamism of the circus become a metaphor for her struggles with the subconscious and the unconscious. 

curator: Michalina Sablik

coordinator: Katarzyna  Piskorz

Maja Krysiak (b. 1980, Czestochowa)