Emilia Kina: Le soir qui tombe

Painter Emilia Kina's exhibition during Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2022.

Does a painting conceal more than it reveals? Emilia Kina examines the nature of paintings, the illusion imbedded in them, but also their physical construction. In her own works she often alludes, though in a non-obvious way, to works from the history of modern and contemporary art. Le soir qui tombe is the title of a painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, which has now inspired Kina to create a multi-phase painterly narrative. Kina’s paintings are arranged in the gallery space in a staging whose theme is the cyclicality of nature and the dramaturgy inherent in it, the human inclination to read the world—and art—as a romantic spectacle. This scenic concept contains a promise of sublime pleasure, but also the anxiety associated with the elusiveness and fragility of the anticipated moment, the ideal instant, this one image.