Room No 28

Images of places marked with the individuality of their users are, alongside portraits, the main motif of Beata Stankiewicz's realistic art. The artist attempts to portray a man by showing the space in which he/she exists. Room No 28 belongs to a series of paintings presenting the interiors of the so-called artists' retreats. These accommodation facilities belonging to various institutions (such as the Polish Academy of Sciences, Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academy of Arts) have for decades offered artists conditions for creative work and recreation. Stankiewicz copied the residential interiors with intimate atmosphere from photograhps. Her paintings are a personal record of experiencing a given space in which light intensity and colour play the lead role.

Beata Stankiewicz (b. 1973) – pursues painting, photography, video art. Graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow (diploma in 1998 from Professor Józef Lucjan Ząbkowski's studio). She is inspired by the surrounding reality, from which she extracts fragments that, through change of scale and special cropping, become close to abstraction. Her realistic works are mostly based on her own photograhic documentation and are a personal record of space. The artist works in series, most often creating large-scale, hyperrealistic depictions of bits of reality: images of trees or residential interiors (mainly artists' studios, viridaries or monastic cells). She also pursues portrait painting, in which light and colour play the most important role. Since 2005 she and her husband have run a noncommercial art gallery in their home: flat 23. Her works are, among others, in the collections of Bunkier Sztuki and MOCAK.