Passagesby Maria Kozak

Passages is Warsaw and New York-based artist Maria Kozak’s second exhibition with Dreamsong and features a series of new oil on linen and burlap paintings alongside a painted freestanding screen. Cataloguing states of metamorphosis, Kozak recalls German Expressionism in moody, diaphanous paintings that explore the psychic and emotional toll of transition. Alluding to the gap between the world’s material reality and our perception thereof, The Map and the Territory (which borrows its title from Michel Houellebecq’s novel), a dual-sided screen, shows several figures in various states of corporality atop shifting grounds of pink, green and cobalt blue. In A Bad Case of the Stripes, a figure peeks through a curtain, half-hidden from the waiting world. Capturing both the precarity of liminality and its sheer strangeness, Kozak’s vertiginous paintings materialize the disorientation of the precipice, aptly responding to a world in a state of dizzying flux.