Agata Słowak (Polish, born in 1994) has never been afraid of addressing difficult social issues while using daring imagery. Her work, centered on painting and sculpture, questions so-called traditional family values, which have been supportive of patriarchy throughout the centuries till today. The female body claims the central role in Słowak’s oeuvre, permanently confronting the viewer with her hermetic fantasy world where violence, cruelty, and submission live together. The title of the sculpture The Doll I (2019) suggests a toy to play with. However, Słowak’s doll is all but encouraging play; it presents an exposed, naked female body in a sort of frenzy with a formless newborn doll on her lap, referring perhaps to the recent abortion conflicts around the world, in which a woman’s right to abortion has been questioned (again).

The female body by Słowak is a battleground: it can be submissive or in charge, attacked or violent itself. The phantasmagorical approach to the imagery, and Słowak’s indirect references to the grand surrealist female artists, such as Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo, places her work in the long tradition of surrealism that has stimulated reflection through evoking weird associations and heavy emotions. Although still very young, Słowak has already developed her specific, easily recognizable visual language that, next to surrealism, borrows heavily from Christian imagery – using dark colors, many variations of brown, a medieval lack of perspective, and cropped figures.