Agata Pavlovec

Agata Pavlovec is a contemporary visual artist who uses a variety of art media, mainly painting and book illustration. She creates both completed and ongoing series, moving between abstraction and figurative art, between painting and spatial installations. Her creative expression is distinctive, achieved through spontaneous brushstrokes, which serve as direct chroniclers of current moods.

The exhibition features three of the six works from the series I Won’t Say a Thing, But I Won’t Keep Quiet Either, as part of which Agata Pavlovec analyses suffering – a consequence of violence against women, which results from historically unequal power relations between women and men. In doing so, she also explores violence as a problem of contemporary society, which perpetuates the gender power imbalance, leading to abuse that causes physical and psychological harm to those who suffer it. Grotesque large-format compositions, painted on bed sheets, pair conscious and subconscious images with archetypal symbolism. The series I Won’t Say a Thing, But I Won’t Keep Quiet Either encompasses the artist’s deliberations on interpersonal relationships, and in particular explores sensitive topics that are not discussed enough, such as abortion, sexual and psychological violence, mobbing, domestic violence etc.

In her series titled Channelling, consisting of six collage works, the artist focuses on the photographic self-portrait, which she works through painting, develops it horizontally, multiplies it and presents it using a distinct colour language. In doing so, she uses various self-portrait photographs and photographs of herself taken by others. In the Channelling series, she deals with herself, thus “channelling” herself through various roles, moods and mental states. The images follow one another like a filmstrip, showing fragments of the artist’s life story.