LAURA MAKABRESKU
‘THE GREAT SILENCE OF THE LITTLE PEOPLE’
Vernissage: 21 September 2023 at. 18.00
“Gardzienice” Gallery, 5a Grodzka Street, Lublin
Kamila Kansy, known as Laura Makabresku, is a visual artist. She was born in 1987 in Brzesko. Studied Polish Philology at the Pedagogical University in Krakow. Currently, she and her husband live and work in the Polish countryside.
Made her debut in 2012 with an exhibition within the framework of Photomonth in Krakow. Since then, she has presented her works at home and abroad. She is the winner of the “Arteon” Award for 2018, the OKSS National Sacred Art Contest in 2021, and the European Art Contest organised by FAFCE in 2023. Creativity is part of simple everyday life for her. It is the place where she goes out expecting to encounter Personal Beauty.
Makabresku photographs and writes, or rather weaves, stories whose threads though scattered across the frames and titles of the works weave a common narrative of the acute and melancholic, the gentle and simple abiding in the world. In encountering her works, the viewer often identifies with her characters, who are shown as participants in the reality depicted in all its fullness, involved in it in all its dimensions on an equal footing. Recalling this miraculous disposition of the human being and opening up to it again is, paradoxically, an activity that does not require effort (activity, expenditure), but rather to bare one’s senses and the space around, to allow silence to emerge and the tormenting longing for Paradise to emerge, to resuscitate thinking about the world in terms of fairy tales and myth.
The artist calls this kind of work ‘mystical realism’, where the metaphysical is intertwined with the material in a mysteriously obvious way, without a heavy impression of the extraordinary. Everything seems to be in its proper place, although it is difficult to say how this happens. These works seem to be mined from the artist’s very personal experiences, although the popularity of her works indicates that these are experiences shared by many of her audience, which leads one to believe that perhaps they do indeed contain crumbs of truth about existence.