CHAPELLE DES PÉNITENTS-BLEUS / NARBONNE / FRANCE / 2023

Between safety and precariousness, Anna Novika Sobierajski’s cabins offer ephemeral shelters for the imagination.

Anna Novika Sobierajski was born and raised in Poland. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź and the Montpellier School of Fine Arts, she now teaches at the Fine Arts school in Sète. Alongside her teaching, she develops a body of work in drawing, printmaking, and painting that extends toward object-making and sometimes performance. Her work is populated by figures, forests, and architectures, where childhood impressions and personal history intertwine with universal questions.

Over the years, the evolution of her practice has followed her inner journey. After exploring the state of in-between that long inhabited her — between two countries, between the place one leaves and the one one seeks, between insecurity and freedom — she now questions the intimate space where she dreams of settling. For the Chapelle des Pénitents-Bleus in Narbonne, the trees and forests of her childhood return to haunt her imagination. She presents a wooden cabin covered with drawings of branches, whose graphic gesture plunges her into “a kind of meditative state, close to automatic writing.” On the floor of the cabin, the image of trees printed upside down creates a dizzying sensation of falling. “The cabin is a childhood fantasy, a place of one’s own in which to hide. But isn’t the feeling of safety an illusion, a form of prison?”

As in her entire body of work, doubt is never far away, and from refuge to confinement there is only one step. Anna Novika Sobierajski also presents ink and Bic pen drawings by her teenage daughter, a transitional age whose hesitant character she appreciates — poised between fragility and vital strength.

Maeva Robert

IN BETWEEN...
CHAPELLE DU QUARTIER HAUT / SÈTE / FRANCE / 2015

The rigor of the grid to anchor feeling

Speaking about her work, Anna Novika Sobierajski herself uses the expression “crossed territories,” and I can only agree. Indeed, it is a matter of crossing territories, and in some of her drawings the artist emphasizes the conflictual relationship between the human body — the female body in this case — and the rigid landscape of machines. The giraffe’s neck is not long enough to rival the telescopic crane. Superpowered machines do not know the word “fatigue”; they do not know the word “sleep,” and even less “tenderness” or “caress.” What can skin, leaves, branches, flesh — the living elements of nature — do against the rectilinear grids of metal and the invisible networks of waves that guide and monitor us? What can one nation do against another, stronger nation, better equipped and better armed, that invades and occupies it? (Let us not forget that Anna Novika Sobierajski is originally from Poland, a country that has always struggled to maintain its independence, caught between its two great neighbors, Germany and Russia.)

But Anna Novika Sobierajski goes even further than that.

She has the will to see clearly. She undertakes demanding work that requires lucidity, composure, and distance. To place oneself at the meeting point of opposites, to move across antagonistic territories that challenge and call upon you, almost presupposes the ability to split oneself in two and to play a double game. Anna Novika Sobierajski must be strong within; she must possess an identity firmly anchored in her body. It is a risky, uncomfortable situation that gives her work a blended taste of calm and struggle, serenity and aggressiveness, peace and harshness, softness and roughness.

From a formal point of view, this tense harmony is expressed through an equally tense confrontation and balance: between the suppleness of curves and the sharp boundaries of straight lines; between the luminosity of white and the darkness of black; between the lightness of emptiness and the weight of fullness.
And also between what is fixed in the painting — for example, the black flat surfaces — and the movement introduced upon them by a video projector.

But Anna Novika Sobierajski goes even further than that.

What, at its core, is this story about? What does the artist tell us through her work? She speaks to us of principles that lie at the foundation of our adventure as living beings, and which I would summarize as follows: the proper use of constraints in the exercise of freedom. Structure must be defined in order to unfold spontaneity and improvisation. The rigor of the grid is needed to anchor feeling. Firm, stable materials are required to hold soft, fragile, floating, elusive, hesitant materials. Solid riverbanks are needed for the river to flow to the sea. But freedom must not be mortally wounded by constraint.

But Anna Novika Sobierajski goes further still.

She descends beneath surface truths. She plunges into the world of ghosts, into the world of shadows. What she seeks can only be seen with eyes closed. What she tells can only be spoken with the words of silence.

Pierre Tilman

The experiences captured in these works reflect the phenomenon of perceiving the surrounding space through the overlay of traced memories of longing and emotion. The French critic Pierre Tilman writes: “From a formal point of view, Anna Novika Sobierajski’s works balance between equilibrium and instability, light and shadow, precision and the free gesture (…).” This is particularly evident in the series Haze. In the ink drawings one can see both an obsession with precision and a state of trance, a literal and emotional effort — the effort that accompanies working with memory.

The triptych entitled Pulling Down the Sky captures the essence of the inner conflict of a person seeking a home beyond the landscape of childhood; it is a work about the inner experience of transforming landscape. The sky — the same for everyone — seems transformed once the journey has begun. Among the drawings we also find installations and projections that transfer the zone of remembered inner images into the sphere of the concrete reality that surrounds us.

The exhibition at the Arttrakt Gallery is particularly significant in relation to the theme it addresses: it is the artist’s first presentation in Poland since emigrating to France.

Patrycja Mastej