The scenes into which Jankowska’s pictures invite us are like a fairytale. In the middle of a forest of snow-covered trees stands a boy. Next to him, on a leash, his faithful companion, a wolf. Or is there something deceptive about this idyll?

Painter Malgosia Jankowska was born in 1978 in Sochaczew, Poland and studied painting in Warsaw and Berlin. With fine brush strokes, she sets people and nature in opposition to each other. She masterfully creates pictures of stunning depth and spaciousness by alternating translucent and pastose colors. Mysteriously, white light bursts through the tree trunks of some paintings like a white haze. The filigree lines, together with the softened tones – sometimes restricted to a single color on a white background, hearken back to the engravings of old fairytale books.
In the literal sense, the word “fantastic” is also highly symbolic of the repertoire that Jankowska runs through her painted world and has become a succinct characteristic of her art: Children in the forest, wolves, or colossal toadstools are not just visual images from a borrowed reality à la Brothers Grimm. Jankowska has acquired an ensemble of figures entirely her own, which she always places in relation to one another. The child as emblem of innocence, roaming free in the dangerous forest, mirrors a secret world of the subconscious. Nature becomes the space for buried fears and wishes.
Little details in which wonderful, tenderly painted scenes, like a tiny stake on the edge of the ice floe in “The boy and the wolf,” stimulate the imagination of the viewer. How did the child and animal end up on the ice floe? Was there a boat? Much only becomes visible upon close inspection. In one painting, the first human trace noticeable is a tidy wooden house in the middle of a tall forest. Almost completely overlooked is the little girl sitting on the forest floor, next to a red toadstool that is as big as she is.

Stephan Reisner