Hotel Warszawa Art Fair 2025

As part of the 4th edition of the Hotel Warszawa Art Fair, Gunia Nowik Gallery is pleased to present works by Jędrzej Bieńko, Agata Bogacka, and Alina Kleytman. Bringing together painting, sculpture, and video, the presentation explores the entangled dynamics of power, vulnerability, and transformation—both individual and collective—within the charged, intimate architecture of the hotel room.

Jędrzej Bieńko’s haunting compositions evoke dreamlike states where human and non-human forms dissolve into one another. Rendered in subdued tones on raw linen, his paintings reflect on mortality, empathy, and the porous boundaries between self and other. They offer a quiet meditation on unity in the face of fragmentation and loss.

Agata Bogacka’s abstract paintings use smooth tonal transitions—gradients—as both formal strategies and metaphors for negotiation: between presence and absence, agency and constraint. Built through careful layering, erasure, and revision, her compositions retain traces of earlier gestures, suggesting memory as a site of tension and transformation. Fields of color appear to confront or bypass one another, evoking the psychological and political dynamics of division, and the fragile conditions of connection.

Alina Kleytman’s sculptural and video works confront trauma and domination through a grotesque and often darkly ironic lens. Her “hysterical realism” blends materiality and mythology, turning objects of mourning, fetish, and ritual into tactile expressions of survival and dissent. In the confined space of the hotel, her hybrid forms act as both relics and ruptures—monuments to memory and defiance.

Together, the works of Bieńko, Bogacka, and Kleytman form a psychological and symbolic landscape—one that negotiates tenderness and violence, dissolution and repair. The room becomes a site of emotional and political entanglement, where boundaries are redrawn and meaning remains in flux.

Jędrzej Bieńko

Painter, born in 2000 in Warsaw. His work combines a refined airbrush technique with a distinctive pictorial language rooted in symbolic imagery and a muted, earthy palette. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2025), he paints on raw, unprimed linen, allowing the material’s natural texture to play an active role in each composition. Bieńko’s paintings unfold within a dreamlike, sfumato-blurred landscape where boundaries—between humans, animals, and the natural world—are fluid and porous. These painterly tableaus suggest not only strange fairy tales or carnivalesque inversions, but also subtle meditations on intimacy, subjectivity, and the interdependence of all living things. He lives and works in Warsaw.

Alina Kleytman

Visual artist, born in 1991 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She studied Monumental Sculpture at the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (2012) and later at the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia (2015). Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, performance, video, and curatorial projects. Working with materials such as fur, feathers, metal, plastics, and silicone, she often transforms everyday objects into fantastical, uncanny forms. Her work also incorporates artifacts from conflict zones, turning them into memory capsules that confront violence and collective trauma. Kleytman describes her approach as “hysterical realism,” oscillating between vulnerability, grotesque humor, and sharp political commentary. She is the creator of DIRTY WHITE, an AI persona conceived as a vessel for absorbing hatred and rage. In 2018, together with Nikita Kadan and Bogdana Kosmina, she co-founded the curatorial group Wet Hole, which went on to establish Dzherelo Art Pavilion, a 24/7 public art space in Kyiv. She is a two-time laureate of the PinchukArtPrize (2015, 2018) and recipient of the Women in Visual Arts Prize (2021). Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she relocated to Torino, Italy, where she currently lives and works.

Agata Bogacka

Painter, born in 1976 in Warsaw. After she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2001, she quickly became known for her highly stylized, synthetic, figurative paintings – "a painterly diary of mental states” in which she noted down emotions and feelings she had for her near and dear ones. Over time, her paintings evolved and direct references to reality or fragments of reality became increasingly abstract. Her most recent works are based on configuration of planes with the use of tonal transition. The gradient she uses symbolizes blurring and setting the boundaries, while directly referencing complex relations existing between people. These relations can be understood more broadly, include various modes of coexistence: political, social, oppressive, or conciliatory. She lives and works in Warsaw.