{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/agata-bogacka-interactionship-edel-assanti-london-review-digby-warde-aldam/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":130273,"slug":"agata-bogacka-interactionship-edel-assanti-london-review-digby-warde-aldam","title":"Agata Bogacka’s Tortured Symbolism","excerpt":"These are paintings that would feel right at home on the walls of someone’s Florida condominium","content":"\n

These are paintings that would feel right at home on the walls of someone’s Florida condominium

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When an abstract artist offers an instruction for interpreting their work, the prescription can encourage a one-dimensional reading. Such is the case with the painter Agata Bogacka, who invites her audience to consider her oeuvre as a critique of politics in her native Poland, which has in her lifetime – she was born in 1976 – pivoted from communist totalitarianism to free-market democracy. Its society, however, is still riven by ideological debates, not least surrounding LGBTQ rights. Bogacka paints sweeping, frequently pastel-toned strokes with an exceptionally wide brush that lends her (otherwise blank) canvases a distinct character – saturated colour to one side of the stroke; mere traces at the other. These gradations, the artist insists, represent a metaphor for the political spectrum and its vagaries. But without her direction, you’d be unlikely to guess this.

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Interactionship (all works 2026) presents a suite of 10 paintings carrying loaded series titles – Disagreement, Declarations, Annexation, to cite just a few, appended with numbers. We’re left in no doubt that Bogacka – who identifies as queer – cleaves to the progressive side of Poland’s identity debate. The exhibition is bookended by a pair of paintings titled Equality Dream (respectively numbers 11 and 12 from an assumedly larger sequence) that co-opt the rainbow-hued LGBTQ flag into an abstract-expressionist-derived schema. The first dissects the emblem, splitting it into separate rainbow blocks that overlap only at the corners of their opposing right angles; the flag’s yellow stripe is rendered in a custard-like hue that divides the otherwise bare, unprimed canvas into clear halves. The colours in the second descend in a narrow, centrally oriented vertical zip, their intensity fading into an expanse of blankness. These pieces are perhaps the most successful here, retaining an ambiguity rather than projecting an explicit message.

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Avoidants 7 & 8, 2026, acrylic on canvas, diptych, 170 x 130 cm (each). Photo: Ernest Winczyk. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery
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Elsewhere, a symmetrical diptych – Avoidants 7 & 8 – sees Bogacka’s work branch into, or at least towards, the territory of conceptual sculpture. A diagonal, downward-moving swath of Barbie-pink lines the lefthand canvas, its intensity fading into blankness as your eyes shift right; this gesture is almost mirrored by the opposite panel. Read generously, the void at the diptych’s centre and the cleavage between the two paintings might hint towards an absence of political vision; and an unbridgeable gap between ideological poles. Declarations 14 and 16, meanwhile, give us rectangular forms again defined by gradation, and roughly the size and shape of A4 paper sheets, appearing to drift over expanses of bare canvas. These ‘declarations’, if we’re to see them as such, are blank: the time-honoured (if slightly laboured) shorthand for politicians’ empty promises.

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The pictures themselves are distinctly easy on the eye, the soft-fade gradation and warm colours at odds with Bogacka’s allusions to societal discord. There’s no reason why art that aspires to political allegory should be visually abrasive, nor why an artist shouldn’t produce saleable work. And yet it’s a distraction that, for all their tortured symbolism, these paintings would feel right at home on the walls of someone’s Florida condominium.

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Agata Bogacka: Interactionship at Edel Asanti, London, 4-26 September

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From the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

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