00:00What do you think about the show?
00:07I would say that it wasn't like the idea that we should do a show
00:13on the show.
00:14In fact, it was so,
00:16that I got a lot of support with Pauline Fatelier
00:20from her work,
00:22as it was a weekend,
00:24which, of course,
00:27turned out to this series.
00:32When I was in the show,
00:34we were working on the show,
00:36she often talked about the show.
00:40So, in fact, it was such an allegation,
00:44from which this show began.
00:50I have to say,
00:51that the series I have never seen.
00:53We have to look at it.
00:56We have to look at it.
00:57We have to look at it.
00:57In fact,
00:58when I got a big deal,
01:02I had to look back to the show,
01:05I had to look back to the show.
01:08One thing I thought was,
01:10was my own experience.
01:12I was a kid.
01:13My mom sent me to the show with a list of the show,
01:16what I can buy.
01:19It was very uncomfortable.
01:21When I got a lot of experience,
01:23when I got a lot of people,
01:26I saw it,
01:28I saw it in the show.
01:29on a woman who was usually very nice and I thought I had to be able to get out of
01:34it,
01:36to be able to wait for a minute to wait for a minute.
01:39And I have to say that at the bottom of this point, I started to work with my thinking,
01:46that I could make a big portrait of an authoritative woman,
01:53a little bit like a monster, if I'm a radical.
01:58And I worked both with what I saw and what I felt like as a child.
02:08I would say that I didn't have to say that,
02:12that of course, the ceiling is different,
02:16that is just given this topic.
02:19But in fact, I still have to be able to work as a whole,
02:26as a whole, as a whole, as a woman.
02:30What I am interested in is that,
02:32because I am much more focused on the inner work,
02:40not the most part of the inner work.
02:42And I think that it is more important than the kulis,
02:47that I would say.
02:48So, the portraits,
02:51or the women,
02:53which I have created,
02:56I would describe it,
02:58what they are.
02:59I would say that,
03:02I would say that,
03:02a very important thing for me,
03:07is to create,
03:09or to create women
03:10and say it more about the experience of them
03:14or their inner location.
03:21Of course, I think that I have an idea of doing that.
03:25I am going to do this, but I am sure that the work is very spontaneous.
03:30I don't think it will happen in a way.
03:32It is a set of questions and the poem creates an answer.
03:40I am not saying that it is definitive,
03:41because I am the first viewer for the painting or the poem.
03:59When we started to work on the exhibition,
04:03Behind the Counter,
04:05one of the first impulses when it started as an idea
04:10was having friendly conversations in between Adela and Caroline and I
04:16just over the aspects of what does it mean to be in the studio
04:21and what does it mean to make a painting.
04:23And as much as there is this side of making a painting as a creative magical act,
04:29there is also this moment of everydayness, of cleaning the brushes,
04:34preparing the studio, preparing the paints,
04:38so kind of the housework.
04:40And then, you know, us wearing aprons,
04:43I was reminded of the film Żelaza Pultem, a Czech production,
04:48which for me as a teenager was a meaningful film.
04:53It was played on Polish television.
04:55And I loved the aspect of the visuals in that film.
05:01I loved the heroine in the film, which was this midlife woman with a little moustache
05:08who was working in the candy department in the big supermarket in Prague, I guess.
05:17And as much as it was, I think, pro-feminist for me, that film when I was a young girl,
05:22that's what I thought.
05:24I can understand that it's problematic from looking at it right now.
05:29But from the other side, it was like also a pretext for us to start to work on the aspect
05:36who are the women behind the counter and what do they mean nowadays.
05:44One and a half year ago, I was looking for a new studio.
05:47I found this one of the remaining shops in Krakow that used to be a small dedicatessen,
05:57actually of the renowned Polish kind of post-transformation brand called Spoem together.
06:04And looking into the new gentrified area of Krakow, this place really charmed me.
06:12And I thought it's something to make those paintings about women, you know, like in the jobs of services
06:25in 1960s, actually in having the studio in one of those shops.
06:32It's on the corner of the streets on the less busy side of Krakow.
06:38And then when I moved in, it still had the colours of the walls, which were those brownish colours.
06:44It had a big safe where I guess the money was kept.
06:47So it was this uncanny feeling about, you know, making the paintings about the women behind the counter there.
06:59I've been making paintings of women in different environments for maybe about 10 years or so.
07:06And they'd always been these really constructed scenes where I was hiring locations and hiring models
07:12and clothing them and directing them.
07:14And then in about 2016, I started to become much more interested in the life of the city around me,
07:23mainly from sitting on the bus on my way to the studio and back and looking at nail bars,
07:28which were a new thing really springing up everywhere on this bus route to the studio.
07:36And I guess I began to think a lot about all these different lives that there are in the city
07:42and that you get these little glimpses of people as you walk around.
07:48And London is so visually stimulating in that way as you walk around the city.
07:56You're constantly seeing these different scenes, different vignettes, I suppose,
08:02in shops and restaurants and offices as you walk around.
08:07And around the same time, I was reading a book by Lauren Elkin called Flannus,
08:13which is kind of reconsidering this very male 19th century character of the flaneur that, you know,
08:25walks around the city and observes but reimagining it as a woman.
08:31And I suppose it started making me much more aware of what I was seeing in the city.
08:36So I decided I wanted to make a series of paintings that were about that walk around central London
08:43just at that time of day when it's starting to get dark.
08:47So the shops are all still open, but it's getting dark outside,
08:52everything's illuminated.
08:56And the paintings, so the paintings, two of the paintings that are in the exhibition at Telegraph
09:02are from one of these walks around Fitzrovia in London.
09:12So this series of paintings about this observation of women working in the public space of the city
09:21was really the start of what has now been an almost decade-long project already of looking at women's work
09:31and thinking about what that is and how it's valued, whether it's visible or not in the public space of
09:40the city
09:41or in the private space of one's home.
09:45And I was very much, when I was looking at these subjects of women working in these shops and things,
09:52I was thinking about that very much in relation to what that means in a contemporary context
09:59about this very commercialised public space in the early 21st century.
10:07So thinking about these women almost as if they have become like another product, I suppose,
10:15amongst all of these products that we see them in these highly staged interiors,
10:22whether that's a shop with its display of goods for sale or even the way that these spaces are interior
10:29designed.
10:29So the space of the hairdresser with, I suppose, these kind of interior design choices that will in 50 years'
10:41time
10:42really date these works to this particular period.
10:45That's actually very important to me that that is an aesthetic part of this work
10:51so that we know that we're looking at an experience of the city or a view of women's work at
10:57this particular moment.
11:05So with this work I was really thinking a lot about, with this view from the street,
11:13it's almost like the window frames of the shops become like, you know, the framing of a picture already.
11:21And then there are lots of things that happen through that, the way that the space gets divided up by
11:28window,
11:29the sort of internal parts of a window frame which start to isolate one figure from another,
11:35as in the painting cut and finish that's in the show.
11:38The hairdresser is actually separated from the customer and in glossing the other hairdresser painting,
11:51there are these stickers on the window, these sort of flowery stickers.
11:57So there's kind of lots of interesting and quite fun things to think about when I'm painting,
12:02about these different spatial layers, I suppose, the glass that there's this barrier between you and the subject,
12:11and then the way that the space sits behind that.
12:17It's both interesting in pictorial terms thinking about it as a metaphor, I suppose, for painting itself,
12:26and also a lot of fun just technically.
12:36I'm really very happy to see these works in such a different context from both where they were inspired by
12:45in London,
12:48and also in this context with artists who are coming from a different kind of socio-political, cultural background.
13:02So thinking about my experience of the city very much as this very Western capitalist experience of these very commercial
13:14spaces,
13:14but then how that speaks to these paintings that are coming from a communist socialist background,
13:28and how it makes us think about the continuity of that subject of women's work,
13:36but how it sits now in relation to that nostalgic look back maybe to a different time and a different
13:44culture.
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