What does it mean when you have to pick up and go, when you are forced to leave everything behind? In What We Left Behind, Julia Medyńska explores the complexity that arises when all that one has known shifts beneath one's feet and the burden of loss mingles with the innate need for future possibilities. If there is a looking back, there is also a conjuring of a place not yet encountered, its construction only visible in the mind's eye.
Born in communist Poland, Medyńska fled the Eastern Bloc at age five with her mother, bound for West Germany. This early experience of erasure and reinvention continues to inform her art. She draws on subconscious worlds rather than planned sketches as she works, allowing each scene to unfold on the canvas in its own unexpected way. Blurred and crouching figures populate the compositions, merging in such a way that recognizable parts are reduced to traces. In "Dreaming of You", figural outlines overlap, while the play of light and dark creates theatricality within the ghostly uncertainty. In "The Examiner", the mystery is in the subject's posture: a young girl, illuminated by a streetlamp, stands head bowed. She is isolated, yet in the spotlight, and one wonders what she is looking at-or hiding from.
Medyńska produces in multiples, always working on six to eight paintings at a time. The paintings in the exhibition were created contemporaneously, as the war in Ukraine displaced millions and families began to arrive en masse at Poland's door. Together they form a relational narrative, influenced by what the artist terms a "spatial melancholy". Baroque and sometimes disjointed, they are open for interpretation.
Julia Medyńska earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in New York City. Previously, she studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York. After two decades living in the United States, she returned to Poland where she currently lives and works.
