There is a palpable thickness in the flesh that Magda Kirk paints. Her nude characters emerge, tattooed, through a smoky haze, like dreams in the night, as they faintly fade off the canvas. But with rippling muscles and a power that defies the haze, Kirk beckons you to touch and feel each work. The Polish painter uses colors that make you want to take a bite out of that flesh, like some toothsome cotton candy. But these are just surface-level observations. Kirk is digging deeper, experimenting with layers of visual obstruction that show characters in the process of self-discovery, awakening, and understanding how the body as a vessel moves through the world.
In a show in 2022 at GR Gallery in NYC, it was noted that her blurry and partially formed characters quite aptly could convey a sense of absence and the incomplete. That dichotomy is still at play in Magda Kirk’s new solo show, CLOSER, this summer at GR’s Lower East Side space. Magda has kneaded the flesh more deeply with these bodies, as each appears to be looking at the mirror and seeing a form that is wrought with cultural expectations. But also there is a vulnerability, the reality of seeing the self as a work in progress. The tattoos on the flesh are reminders of an internal monologue, and the flexing of the muscles is the body gaining endurance. “I often get surprised by bodies. I think it's a weird experience to have a body,” Kirk once said about her work. And in that simple honesty, an obvious yet rarely understood meaning of living in a body, the work answers the most complex of questions for us. —Evan Pricco
