Małgosia Jankowska – In the enchanted forest
Mediathek Sorted
Małgosia Jankowska has created drawings and colored leaves that view the beauty of nature patiently. That evil is hiding in the idyll you realize only at a second glance. She hellishly and cleverly selects the tone of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The lullaby-like and childlike is intertwined with ghostly perspectives.
The German forest delights, the German forest disturbs. There Hansel and Gretel run, and it is only one small step from losing one’s way to losing oneself. Alone among trees we encounter our own fear and sometimes sinister figures: “For in the forest, there are the robbers.”
Even today, the forest is a foreign, dangerous place and the horror is very real. But it also provides shelter and refuge. Far away from the world and very close to God, the modern hermits have prescribed encapsulation. As far back as 1796 the Romantic poet Ludwig Tieck celebrated the forest, celebrated it as a place of out-of-the-world abandonment.
It may be asserted with slight exaggeration that the forest is, if not an invention of German Romanticism, the German soul landscape sui generis.
What goes around, comes around. Sometimes, of course, there are in Małgosia Jankowska’s drawings only the voices of those beasts hiding in or from civilization or the laughter of those elves who make the forest their playground.
Christoph Tannert, March 2016
CV:
1978 / born in Sochaczew / Polen
1998 –2003 / studied painting at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw
2001 / visiting student at the University of Arts Berlin, Erasmus scholarship
2003 / Diploma at the Academy oft he Fine Arts in Warsaw
Małgosia Jankowska lives and works in Berlin. Her works are avilable at the Galerie Michael Schultz Berlin.