Malwina Chabocka
Malwina Chabocka is an expressionist figurative painter who has exhibited throughout Europe in the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Montenegro, and The Netherlands. Recent solo exhibitions include The Oil Art Advisory Gallery in Knutsford, England, the Portuguese Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, and the Museum of History of Kielce in Poland. Other notable exhibitions include VI International Biennale of Fine Art Nude in Montengro, Manchester Art Fair in England, and Galeria Arte Graça in Lisbon, Portugal. In addition to painting, Malwina is also known as a set and costume designer as well as a writer for various theatre productions.
The figurative works are quite dark and portray various people in positions of discomfort as if expressing pain or trying to release tension. These expressive, painterly figures are typically integrated within an interior depicted by nothing more than geometric flat shapes. Offering a minimalistic background and filled with pastel tones, Malwina’s paintings strive towards expressing figures through smears of paint, with the paint dragged upon the surface.
Much like and dissimilar to the works of Francis Bacon, Malwina’s portrayal of various anatomy may come off as macabre and almost gory, like in Bacon’s work. Although, her works contain a sense of balance, figurative symmetry, and psychological expression through poses not found in Bacon’s paintings. Malwina’s subjects stretch out across the surface and towards the viewer as if trying to escape solitary confinement. She offers a sense of push and pull portraying these dark figures and interiors with pastel tones, putting a restraint on the darkness. The various brushwork flows organically and morphs the figures into organic shapes rather than through representational expressions.
Behind a Blue Veil (pictured above) depicts what appears to be a woman sobbing uncontrollably within an interior while nude. Her robust form lies against the angled interior, depicted by just flat shapes. The expressive brushwork represents her various anatomy as unclear, genetic, organic form. Lifting her leg up upon the surface for which she rests upon, she almost curls up into a ball expressing deep sorrow. Behind a Blue Veil remains one of Malwina’s most expressive and saddest paintings.
Malwina Chabocka presents relevance to expressionism in contemporary painting. She invokes deep emotional impulses and relates them through figures in negative space. Through provocative poses, combined with rough and dragged brushwork, followed by harmonious pastel tones, Malwina portrays a deep complexity to figurative painting in a way which builds upon and advances upon the works of painters such as Francis Bacon. Through psychology and expression, Malwina Chabooka creates emotional environments, not in what she portrays, but how she expresses her subject matter, through negative, empty space, expressive, painterly brush strokes, and psychologically-driven body language.
