Mental Spaces
The Mental Spaces project presents the creative explorations of four artists affiliated with the Institute of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn. The project is defined by interwoven sources of inspiration. The search for means of expression and visual language, as well as the construction of a visual message, emerges through subtleties—sometimes directly articulated, sometimes reinterpreted, or resonating with the original idea.
The works brought together in the project engage with the delicate fabric of existence in its various aspects and modes of understanding. The series, executed in diverse styles and grounded in individual artistic practices, form a distinctive visual language that offers insight into personal creative spaces. The worlds shaped through this approach guide the viewer along paths of difficult questions, doubts, desires, and longings, allowing them to experience the individual subtleties captured in the images.
A powerful message of dissent—expressed through a scream, mockery, and sarcasm—becomes a force in Jarosław Bujny’s works, confronting the viewer with the shameful aspects of flawed social constructs. This painful confrontation holds the viewer before the uncompromising mirror of the image, in which they must see themselves without any numbing, without makeup or illusion. The truths articulated in Bujny’s art are painful, yet they also serve as a necessary diagnosis—one that enables self-reflection and the search for new, better paths.
Violetta Kulikowska-Parkasiewicz’s series of drawings traces a journey mapped out through abstract signs. Its openness carries a soothing power, placing the viewer in a silent state of suspension—both within and beyond time. Rendered through subtle marks, these worlds become intuitive guides for coming to terms with what has been, for embracing what is, and for cultivating a sense of mystical curiosity toward what is yet to come. These drawings form a whispered space-time—focused, contemplative, and filled with a potent emptiness. At the same time, they offer a gentle prophecy, capable of easing the existential burdens of everyday life.
Anna Drońska’s series unfolds as a personal narrative told through the voices of ancestors—a record of fragmented memories pieced together from remnants of past family traumas, sufferings, and desires. The successive images capture fleeting moments suspended in the process of passing, manifesting in the thoughts and struggles of subsequent generations. Their essence stands in contrast to rational cause-and-effect models of personality formation, introducing into this ordered structure a thread of acceptance for transgenerational inheritance. The moments inscribed in the images—painful and heavy, yet also filled with moments of uplift—trace a path across the family map with no clear beginning and perhaps no end.
Joanna Kaczmarczyk’s work is a meditation on relationships. The artist explores the spaces “in between,” where she perceives emotionally charged connections between humans and nature, between individuals and the spaces they shape, and between one another. By engaging with what is most elusive—fleeting emotions, moods, and suspended states between the real and the internally experienced—she constructs a personal visual narrative. Nature occupies a central role in this story—not as a backdrop, but as a source of experience and inspiration. It is from nature that these images emerge: from its rhythms, silences, transformations, connections, interdependencies, and its elusive continuity. It becomes a space where meaning does not demand articulation, and presence alone is enough.
The juxtaposition of four distinct ways of understanding the world within a single presentation acquires an ontological dimension in the Mental Spaces project. The questions posed by the artists do not seek definitive answers. Their value and strength lie in the doubts they evoke—doubts that chart new directions for exploration. They fuel the need to understand what surrounds us, what resides within us, and what exists at the peripheries of being.
dr Anna Drońska
---
Opening: 2026 April 28th 5.00 p.m
Exhibition will be on display: 2026 Arpil 26th - May 21st
