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Poludnica Submission Size[81].jpg

Południca (EN: Midday Spirit)
2023
Gouache on Paper
£400

PoÅ‚udnica is a spirit in Polish folklore that is thought to harm those found in fields at noon. Now considered a demon, she is often depicted as a haggard young woman thirsty for blood. Nikolas wanted to approach her from a different angle – one that is more animistic, and most importantly one where she isn’t evil, but rather an entity integrated into life. In the piece there are elements that can be found unsettling – the eyes, the dark sky, the wheat shadows – and still some that create a pervading sense of calm; there is not a clear distinction between good, evil, damned or sacred. There is ambiguity and the unknown, as in life and its forces, and I wonder how people’s associations to this piece reflect on their attitude to such things - can we let things be so, or is the Abrahamic world forced to draw lines between naturally coexisting concepts? The border is made up of plants that are common in Poland and are either culturally or personally significant. It plays into the boldness, colour, and excess often characteristic of folk art – features often the subject of fear and disapproval of the ‘sophisticated’ art world.

NIKOLAS WERESZCZYNSKI

Nikolas WereszczyÅ„ski is a London-based, Polish artist specialising in gouache painting and printmaking. His work is largely informed by folk culture, which he believes to be a living archive of ‘common’ people’s daily lives, and a secret language through which early religious practices, interpreted by the artist as animistic, have been able to quietly survive periods of strife, colonisation and forced religious conversion. 
 
Nikolas believes folk culture to be the meeting point and the physical embodiment of both daily life and early religious practices, as well as a testament to the lack of any real distinction between the two, as reflected within the animist thought. He strives to make work that expresses qualities of beauty, awe and joy, and that speaks of the mundane as divine, while also creating a quiet, contemplative space that allows for a felt, rather an intellectual experience of his pieces. 
 
Nikolas regularly exhibits in venues across London and beyond, and is a member of the Greenwich Printmakers Gallery which holds the main body of his printed work.

Follow Nikolas on instagram - @awornf 

View Nikolas' website -https://www.nikolaswereszczynski.com/

To purchase this artwork please email n.wereszczynski@gmail.com

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