BLACK ORCHID Painting

Studied in the Department of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, in ateliers
of the Professors: Szancenbach, Brzozowski and Buczek. She graduated in 1983.
She lives and works in Cracow, Poland.

The direction of the creative explorations of Barbara Palka winek is determined by a combination of the self painting pronunced form of its plane. Having dealt with the figurative painting for quite a long time, the painter left however a free margin for the interpretation of her works. It has been a kind of self-protection against the easy trivialisation of the painting form.
The art of Barbara Paka - Winek has many meanings. Her painting is a compromise between the illustrative art and the abstraction. The result of this compromise is the series of paintings, called ,,The Screens" by the author.
The present analysis is an attempt to find a broader philosophical context for ,,The Screens". The brightness of the painting matter, achieved by using the method of glazing is unexpectedly composed with the impenetrable planes of ,,likely figures".
The picture becomes a discourse between the visible - named and impenetrable - mysterious, but also very capacious. This, what seems to us to be impenetrable is most often beyond our awareness. The esteem for The Mystery has already disappeared in our culture. We do not even try to imagine the existence of the Reality beyond the dimension of usefulness. Our consumptive civilisation denies the ,,pure spirits", existing for their own beauty and light only. As useless is rejected everything, which belongs to the intimate, emotional sphere. There are the matters existing behind ,,the screen" usually, intimate, difficult to manifest, but still - real. They relate both to the divine and human affairs and have a common point, defined as a ,,Sacrum" sphere.
Therefore the invisible, but after all real - gave a complete explanation to all what was material and permanently variable, including the final physical deterioration. The screen made possible a reasonable intellectual interpretation of the visible world.
,,Screens" may also, as the author says ,,serve the spiritual liberation", by crossing behind the matter, into the glassy, transparent sphere. The latter is a transfer into another dimension, difficult to achieve by painting. The luminescence, emanescence of the picture is an important formal problem of the Artist's painting.