Karolina Świdecka: The Last Days of Summer

Karolina Świdecka is an artist of remarkable consistency. Already at an early stage in her career, she developed a distinctive and instantly recognisable visual language: contrasting colours, flat areas of colour, strong outlines, and details applied with quick, rhythmic brushstrokes. Her paintings are nostalgic, filled with melancholy and a sense of anticipation, yet at the same time remarkably vivid and visually seductive.

Born in Kraków, where she continues to live and work, Świdecka graduated with distinction from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2001. She studied painting in the studio of Professor Adam Wsiołkowski and drawing in the studio of Professor Janusz Orbitowski.

Beginning in 2002, in collaboration with the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków, she created a series of 39 portraits of prominent figures associated with the city, including Anna Dymna, Grzegorz Turnau, Czesław Miłosz, Jan Nowicki, Krzysztof Penderecki, Jerzy Trela, Anna Polony and Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz.

From portraiture, Świdecka gradually turned towards landscape, creating what might be described as portraits of places. She is a careful observer, drawn to seemingly ordinary views: rural landscapes, playgrounds hidden among trees, modest holiday resorts and other overlooked fragments of everyday surroundings. Filtered through her sensibility, these places become stories about transience and the fleeting nature of a moment.

In the series Bardzo długi lipiec (A Very Long July), Karolina Świdecka portrays holiday resorts and summer retreats. The title evokes the childhood experience of time, when July seemed to stretch almost endlessly. Seen from an adult perspective, however, all that remains of it are a handful of images.

These scenes have a strongly decorative quality. Świdecka simplifies forms while using intense, deliberately unreal colours. Details are treated almost ornamentally, painted with short, rhythmic brushstrokes. This visual richness contrasts with the silence and stillness of the places she depicts. After all, these are not realistic landscapes, but versions of them preserved in memory.

The places she portrays are not contemporary hotel complexes, but the slightly forgotten holiday cabins tucked among pine trees. Nearby, there might be a somewhat rusty football goal. There is a playground too, with a metal swing coated in layers of oil paint. Somewhere close by, one can easily imagine a canteen with the day's menu posted outside. We have all been there — at least those of us who were born in Poland in the previous century.

Although these places were created for leisure and recreation, people rarely appear in the paintings themselves. Their presence is suggested instead by the objects they have left behind: empty deckchairs, swings, football goals, and strings of lights suspended between the trees.

It is the end of summer. The holidaymakers have already left, and autumn is waiting just around the corner. A season of carefree days and play is drawing to a close.