Magdalena Salome 'Remedies'

Opening: 16.01.2025 at 18:00

Bacalarte Gallery

Litewska 11/13, apt. 202, Warsaw

Curatorial team: Paweł Brylski, Klaudyna Szymańska

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Exhibition open from 17.01.2025 to 13.02.2025

during gallery opening hours:

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday: 16:00-19:00

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Magdalena Salome has been equally interested in art and natural sciences since childhood, both in creating and studying. She grew up with a botanical atlas in hand, chasing all the prescriptions and sketching backyard blades with fascination. She graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts, but she would sometimes get lost in the forest and in the text, catch grasses and new varieties, lie in the moss, and listen intently to her biologist friend's lectures.

Her studio is like a laboratory, dried plant tissues laid out to their components rest in jars with pigments, with which she paints pictures. Magdalena Salome exists somewhere between the green leaves of ilex paraguariensis, avocado seeds, and the academic subtle drawing in white gouache. The artist's creative process begins when she transforms the collected avocado seeds from her loved ones into dye, studies the intensity of color, deciding on the next immersion in the purple pot. Just moments before the act of creation, she weighs her strength and clarity of mind, for her being with nature is not selective but holistic. She surrenders to the process with respect and care, ensuring that the noise of the day does not disrupt the message. The artist's line seems to shimmer on penetrating greens. In this way, Magdalena Salome grounds herself, giving space to a broadly understood being.

Biophilia literally means love for living beings in Greek, the need for relationality with the natural world, which is deeply rooted in our biological identity. Although homo sapiens as a species attempts to tame and isolate nature, it has been intertwined with it for a long time on the evolutionary path. Depression, asthma, muscle pain, migraines, neuroses, or other ailments can have a sharper course with a lack of contact with nature; isolation from nature brings many losses for physical and mental well-being. Magdalena Salome repeats or recreates in visual art the beneficial effects of plants on the nervous system and immune system. Imitating nature is for her not so much about reproducing shapes but about trying to evoke through artistic works the same effect that nature has on human well-being.

Art allows for the restoration of lost bonds, to reverse such relationships with nature that our modern science fathers accustomed us to, cataloging, naming, and appropriating the world, while not allowing women access to knowledge. Magdalena Salome draws from biological sciences, but through art, she does it in a sensitive way. In her approach to nature, she allows for the error of emotionality and corporeality, the lack of neutrality, and fragility. The artist looks beneath the surface of reality; in imitating nature, she is not interested in superficial judgment, category, name, or appearance of reality. She tries to penetrate to the nature of things; her practice allows for looking beneath apparent layers, breaking through superficiality. Magdalena Salome transforms tensions into calm, quiets and soothes with knowledge, enveloping the gaze. She invites you to her garden as a humble researcher with a remedy.

text: Paweł Brylski, Klaudyna Szymańska