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Shedding Light on Emotions. An Exhibition of Works by Joanna Sarapata

31.10.2023 – 9.12.2023

As many as eighteen paintings by Joanna Sarapata, one of the most recognisable contemporary artists, will be presented in the historical interiors of the Lentz Villa as of 31st October at an exhibition titled ‘Shedding Light on Emotions’. Well known for her extraordinary representations of womanhood, in Szczecin Sarapata presents both her most recent paintings and unique works kept in private collections.
In the course of her career, now spanning more than thirty years, Sarapata has developed her own characteristic, unmistakable style. Her sensuous ballerinas and captivating nudes never cease to delight audiences.

The woman is at the centre of her artistic reflections – her beauty and sensuality, but also a wide spectrum of emotions, frequently expressed through body language. For many years, Sarapata has shared with her audience a wide spectrum of varied experiences. Qualities that may at first seem like polar opposites become a unity in her paintings, resulting in extraordinary beauty. Feminine strength and delicacy, the body’s sensual appeal and its transitory nature – all have a place in her compelling works.

Visitors to the Lentz Villa will have an opportunity to see as many as 18 different works, which represent a cross-section of the artist’s creative universe. They convey movement and emotions, taking the viewers into the mysterious world of womanhood. The paintings now to be shown in Szczecin tell the story of emotions and bring out their unique beauty. The exhibition titled ‘Shedding Light on Emotions’ is a universal expression of femininity, touching the viewer’s heart on many levels. The exhibition comprises, apart from works from private collections, also the most recent, previously unpresented paintings, prepared specially for this event at the Lentz Villa.

A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Art in Paris, Sarapata has had her paintings exhibited since 1987, including in France (where she lived and worked for nearly 20 years) as well as Spain (where she was active for the next 8 years), Monaco, Germany, the United States, and Switzerland. Since 1998 they have also been presented in Poland.

Event partners: BMW BOŃKOWSCY, RADISSON BLU HOTEL SZCZECIN

Media patrons: TVP KULTURA, WIRTUALNA POLSKA, RADIO NOWY ŚWIAT, RYNEK I SZTUKA, WELL.PL, WSZCZECINIE.PL, ARTINFO.PL

The exhibition ‘Shedding Light on Emotions’ can be visited every day except Sundays and Mondays. The opening hours are as follows:

Tuesdays – 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Wednesdays – 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Thursdays – 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Fridays – 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Saturdays – 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

We look forward to seeing you at this exhibition.







Lucia Mugnolo. In Search of the Decisive Moment.

Since the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the father of street photography, the ‘decisive moment’ has defined the quintessence of capturing what is remarkable in everyday life using a photo camera. Dribbling amongst the crowd like a basketball player (Garry Winogrand) or traversing the city like a hunter in search of the right theme (H. Cartier-Bresson), photographers combine agility and superb reflexes with intuition and sensitivity, which allows them to capture precisely the right moment, comprising a whole conglomerate of important sociological, political, historical, and cultural information.

As an heir to the postwar Italian school of photography, Lucia Mugnolo documents reality in what basically looks like objective ‘photographic notes’ but in fact conveys a large amount of empathy for the theme and the model alike, as well as a deep aesthetic sense of both the sophisticated and the seemingly banal. All this comes with a grain of peculiar irony and distance, so typical of Neapolitan culture with its long-term continuity that resists passing political and social trends.

What is characteristic of Mugnolo is her fascination with reflections, repetitions, and rhythms as a way of reflecting on the elusive and the indefinable. It is an experience of the transitory nature of things, an attempt to discover and observe multiple layers of reality, a kind of play with various perceptions of time, frozen still for a brief moment in the photograph. This is what makes her works into something more than a mere dry, documentary record. These photographs take on a semblance of action and direct sensation. They thus become a ritual of co-experiencing the photographed objects, which involves both the senses and the intellect – one in which the viewer and the photographer both have their part.

‘I’m very fond of telling tales,’ says Lucia Mugnolo about her photo-stories, which she creates during walks through her home city of Naples. Its streets ‘teach’ one to be human, to feel a sense of community and belonging, while the interactions that take place at every step, often spontaneously, obliterate that sense of loneliness among the crowd that has become symptomatic of many present-day metropolises. The four visual-narrative ‘chapters’ of our exhibition represent selected aspects of the city’s life. We are first greeted by portraits of its inhabitants, captured as they are getting about their everyday business. We then get carried away by the carnival crowd and by football fans celebrating SSC Napoli’s Serie A Championship 2023. We also meet the city’s inhabitants enjoying their free time at the sunny waterfront, with the inscrutable Vesuvius towering above them. We eventually reach the Neoclassical Villa Pignatelli and succumb to the beauty of the region’s artistic heritage.

Naples is a wandering – ‘Napule è na' camminata’, as the local bluesman Pino Daniele once sang. We may feel overpowered by its beauty at times, stunned by its chaos at others, but it never turns out to be average or boring. It remains in constant flux, eternally escaping any rigid frameworks and strict classification. Walking with her camera in search of the ‘decisive moment’, Lucia Mugnolo does not attempt any conclusive definition of that indomitable city. Rather, from the perspective of an insider, she presents us with a subjective chronicle of its everyday life, made up of moments and fragments, featuring those who contribute to the immense wealth and multidimensionality of the city’s identity.

Marta Wróblewska
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