Malgosia Jankowska

les or lines from romantic Eichendorff poems. Yet she shows anything but mere forest and nature idylls. Of course, her drawings (in which she uses felt-tip pens as well as watercolors in a quasi-drawing style) take a neo-romantic direction. However, her forest scenes are ambivalent. Tranquil idyll or threatening backdrop? Nature with its power of attraction or also with its frightening power. In any case, there is something floating and mysterious about these large-format drawings. Malgosia Jankowska seems to want to breathe something enchanted, something enchanting into the fairytale-like scenes in the act of drawing.

Jankowska assembles new fantasy landscapes from digitally photographed individual motifs in a stringent and technically mastered manner. Children sit unsuspectingly next to a dead deer in the water, playing by the water, which seems inviting, but also strangely abysmal. An oversized owl rises from wintry trees in red. Malgosia Jankowska’s works have something magical about them, immersing us in archetypal images of legends, myths and fairy tales. And despite all the forest secrets with snakes, dead animals, poisonous mushrooms, stagnant water, birds or wolves, the pictures also radiate innocence – the children, often lost in themselves and not knowing what messages from nature they seem to be dealing with, are a clear symbol of this. In addition to the convincing technique, which also reveals a study of old master drawings, Malgosia Jankowskasubtil plays with light. She makes impressive use of the paper, which allows her to leave out white areas, to direct rays of light and streams of light across her nature, animal and children’s scenes. A precisely calculated color palette also has a not insignificant effect on the mysterious floating effect.

Special gray-blue-brown mixtures often create a calm mood. This makes the color accents all the more surprising. Suddenly red mushrooms or red berries appear. Like little warning symbols in a nature that modern man seems to be losing more and more of, that he has forgotten how to really experience. Malgosia Jankowska learned how to use felt-tip pens in Japan. Some of her works also have a slightly Japanese feel to them.

And in some pictures, the artist, who likes to leave Berlin for excursions into the forests of the Uckermark, adds to the weaving of forest secrets and “builds” huts into her works that don’t really seem to rest on the ground. They are symbols of places of refuge in mysteriously fascinating and oppressive nature.

Martin Preisser – St. Galler Tagblatt