In the paintings of Ewa Czwartos and Karolina Żądło, women do not need to speak loudly to be heard. Their presence resonates in their physical fulness, the emotionality of their gestures, and an inner light. They are intense, irreducible, while they are building a new, bold order of meaning. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from the musical Cabaret, sounds like an ironic reassurance that undermines its own message from the outset. The phrase “no troubles here” does not describe reality but rather refers to an imposed script that taught women to remain silent. The artists adopt it only to invalidate it. The protagonists of the works return to the visual space with full awareness, refusing to remain in the background. They recall figures from icons, tapestries, altarpieces, fairy tales, myths, and TV series, but do not recreate old roles. They speak in their own language, where the gaze becomes the beginning of awakening and responsibility, not a path to innocence.
Every detail — a braid, a drape, an object, or a gesture — is a clue and never merely decorative. Together, they form a new alphabet, where aesthetics do not serve to embellish but to build tension and meaning with precision. The painting of Czwartos and Żądło does not shout, nor does it impose a story. Instead, it leads the viewer through a ritual of attentiveness, where repetition, multiplication, borrowing, and subtlety become a language of critique and resistance. Female bodies cease to be objects. They gain materiality, subjectivity, and agency. Their silence, standing in formation, is not a sign of indifference or absence of message, but an act of resistance in a different form. It is a gesture of reclaiming both image and narrative. The space of these works becomes a field of negotiation between memory and the present, between intimacy and social context. Formal elegance does not conceal meaning — it condenses it.
Berlin offers a particular context for this exhibition. Its history of crossing boundaries, of divisions and attempts to rebuild unity, opens up new layers of interpretation. The work of Czwartos and Żądło does not seek national or generational representation in order to speak. It does not conform to simple cultural affiliations. Their paintings focus on the fate of the individual in the crowd and become records of experiences that resist easy definition. They do not recount the past but construct new forms of presence from it. Nothing here is accidental — each element carries its own weight and place. These are images that linger in the mind, not because they provide ready answers, but because they outline a new perspective and order.
In a world saturated with divisions and simplifications, the art of Czwartos and Żądło reminds us that a gaze can be the first gesture of reconciliation, a return to the original truth and sense of being. It does not enter into a debate between aesthetics and engagement, nor does it submit to political classifications or formal expectations. It emerges at the intersection of sensitivity and precision. It is beautiful, though not made to beautify. Present, though it makes no manifestos. Their painting arrests with its intensity and calls for attentiveness. It reminds us that art not only can speak of a world without exclusion but actively shape it — through a willingness to be together, even if in different ways.
Text by Michał Borowik
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