“The wound is where the light enters you.” This line comes from a poem by the thirteenth century Sufi poet Rumi. It is used by Marzena Ablewska as the epigraph to her website and one may view the considerable achievement of her art as a continuing illumination of the extraordinary worlds that she has brought into creation.
Ablewska was born in 1978 in Pionki, a town in central Poland where she spent her early childhood before the family moved to Bytom in the south. By the age of 15, she had decided to become an artist despite parental pressure to pursue her academic studies, in which she excelled. In fact, her wide-ranging and enquiring mind was harnessed to her passion for art and the next five years were formative not simply in honing formidable graphic and painting skills, but also in exploring world literature, history, philosophy and psychology – and of course, art. She has lived in London since 2017.
Among twentieth century Polish artists, Ablewska was particularly drawn to the paintings and writings of Stanisław Witkiewicz (1885 –1939), the avant-garde theatre and art of Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990), and the disturbing sculptures, mannequins and dolls of Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) and the German Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). All worked in the shadow of war and their art reflects this. The interconnected stories of The Street of Crocodiles by the Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) had a particular impact. In scenes of magic and disconcerting madness, nature and inanimate objects such as buildings, rooms and their contents are invested with what we would normally regard as human feelings. In much of Ablewska’s work the relationship of humans to their natural and built environment, is called into question through transformations, symbols and the invoking of myth. In this respect, these works reflect Ablewska’s continuing study of Jung’s theories on the relation of the conscious and unconscious, and the importance of symbol.
Literature provides starting points but never determines the image: Ablewska takes her own path:
“When I was a teenager, Bruno Schulz was one of my favourite writers and artists. Crocodile Street refers to his chapter of the same title. I was enchanted by its magic realism then. Crocodile Street now is for me a symbol of the unconscious, so I have tried to paint this unconscious landscape of the self, with wounds, desires, hidden thoughts.
Dreams are another source of Ablewska’s paintings and drawings. She says that she often wakes with an image and composition fully formed so that she is freed to concentrate on questions of technique. On occasion she writes accompanying texts, sometimes in the form of a narrative (The Song about unexisted photography), sometimes as an ecstatic vision (The Song about Mar. Part 2).
Pionki is surrounded by forests where Ablewska spent much of her childhood with friends and grandparents. So many of her pictures teem with flora and fauna – real, imagined or metamorphosed – that relate to Ablewska’s principal subject, the female, in all sorts of enigmatic and often disturbing ways. She recalls a game she used to play in the forest called ‘Secrets,’ which involved finding and carefully arranging objects - ‘treasures’- inside a box, then burying it out of the sight of others. When we look at Ablewska’s pictures perhaps we are witnessing their unearthing.