Afterimages of Memory

Gentle silence envelops Malgorzata Neubart's landscapes. Waterways reflect the sky and softly contoured woodland that are dotted with slender, graceful trees. In oil on canvas or on wood, the artist captures the changing faces of a shore area alongside the Bug River in Polish Mazovia. Located close to her hometown of Warsaw, the idyllic region has been familiar to her already since her childhood. Today, she still visits there regularly from Hamburg, where she resides after completing her studies, contemplating the scenery in the flux of time. Her landscape paintings, subsumed under the term Places, have continuously evolved in the background, accompanying her portraits: depictions of people she has often personally met and whose faces nonetheless embody universal human characteristics for her that transcend the individual. This also applies to her landscapes, which, as afterimages of memory, do not render true-to-life representations, but rather convey atmospheres and dreamlike evocations. In both genres of her work, the artist draws upon her own experiences of reality. By reducing her perceptions and encounters to their essential features, she thus creates abstractions from these, which are liberated from their site- and person-specific attachment. While the portrayed figures usually seem to rest within themselves in meditative introspection, the Places appear like detached terrains, which have emerged from the artist's inner vision. In her paintings, Neubart makes intermediate states palpable in which the nearby and the distant, the concrete and the intangible, condensation and dissolution, the familiar and the remote, are kept in a suspended balance: grasped in moments in which the subjects' essence reveals itself.

Belinda Grace Gardner