* Some works in the exhibition may include content inappropriate for minors or highly sensitive individuals.
Love is like a painter. A good painter so delights people with his works that, when contemplating them, they are held in suspense, sometimes to the point of seeming rapt in ecstasy and transported beyond themselves, forgetting their very selves.[1]
Girolamo Savonarola, 1493
As Agata presents in her studio nearly complete paintings for her upcoming exhibition, revealing the final title, the word “oxytocin” feels strangely out of place, even menacing – less like the ‘love hormone’ and more like a toxic compound. Even in scenes where violence is absent, and replaced by explicit sexual pleasure, a subtle anger simmers beneath the surface, a constant echo of unfulfillment. If Agata Słowak’s paintings reflected the reality of love, Nora Ephron would be known for screenplays echoing Żuławski’s Possession, not her romantic comedies.
Słowak’s painting absorbs traumatic experiences like a sponge. Take her landscapes, for example. The settings initially appear conventional, almost like the flimsy, pretextual backdrops in Bruno Schulz’s cartoonish pornotopias. However, the characteristic background – reminiscent of a smoke-choked wasteland, a truly Venusian landscape – reveals itself to be the painter’s own neighbourhood: Warsaw’s district of Muranów. However, it is a landscape of ruins, dominated only by the solitary tower of St. Augustine’s Church – a scene that echoed the haunting photographs taken here in the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising. In Słowak’s traumatic realism, the diachronic order is disrupted; the image becomes an outlet for what is repressed from consciousness and covered with soothing layers of banal, everyday life. Muranów appears here as an eternal rubble field, and the sun never breaks through the clouds of smoke from the burning ghetto.
Entering the artist’s studio is a bit like sitting an exam in art history – medieval, modern, 19th- and 20th-century references and evocations can be picked out one after another. But instead of engaging in this kind of iconographic bookkeeping and finding every possible reference, it is worth looking at how Słowak uses historical motifs through the prism of a single theme. In one of her latest paintings, the artist draws on a motif taken from depictions of Lactatio Bernardi – Bernard of Clairvaux in prayerful ecstasy drinking a drop of milk from Mary’s breast, ‘coming to life’ for a moment in a stone sculpture. The history of this iconographic element dates back to the late 13th century (the oldest known depiction comes from the Altarpiece of Saint Bernard kept in the Museu de Mallorca). In the 13th century, Catholic spirituality became rooted in the belief in the miraculous power of apotropaic images, and mystical visions featured the drinking of milk and blood. On a theological level, the breast gushing with milk refers to Mary’s role as a nurturer and protector, but the erotic aspect of the depictions is also significant.
From the High Middle Ages to the art of the post-Tridentine era, the eroticisation of sacred representations and mystical visions was a deliberate act. At the turn of the 12th century, the Benedictine Rupert of Deutz described a (French) kiss with Christ descending from the cross, and about a hundred years later, Gautier de Coincy recounts the testimony of a Muslim converted to Christianity by another animated Marian sculpture with oil leaking from her exposed nipples.[2] The sexual character of representations rooted in the dogma of incarnation, stimulating belief in the possibility of miracles, reaches its zenith in the mature Renaissance. The erection of the Incarnate Angel from an anonymous drawing by an artist in Leonardo’s circle becomes a metonym for the descent to Earth. The power of these images led reformers such as Savonarola and Erasmus of Rotterdam to formulate tirades against depictions that stimulated licentiousness rather than piety.
In Słowak’s painting, milk spurting from the breast is weaponised; instead of nourishing the monk, it strikes the eye of a piglet and a hairy, gnome-ish figure with snake-like legs. We also see the latter being penetrated by a man entangled in the heroine’s shirt, positioned so that his head remains invisible – essentially an extension of her, reduced to the function of a strap-on. It is difficult to discern an act of mystical grace here. In her exaggeration of erotic fantasy to the point of sadism, the painter instead approaches depictions of martyrdom, often equally erotic, as in the case of the motif of the martyrdom of Saint Agatha, popular since the late Middle Ages. The scenes of flaying, stabbing, and decapitation visible in Słowak’s works, straight out of medieval martyrdom iconography, operate on the same logic, in which voyeurism is intertwined with empathy, allowing the viewer, as Martha Easton pointed out, to bend and transcend gender self-identification.[3] However, while medieval depictions of St. Agatha’s martyrdom, and later the slasher trope of the ‘final girl’, emphasise the heroine’s androgyny, allowing the predominantly male audience to identify with her, Słowak demasculinises the character that accompanies her in numerous scenes in her paintings. Deprived of agency, naked, stripped bare, without even a hair on his head, and at other times even without skin, he seems at best half-alive – and, if not literally, then certainly psychologically castrated.
The heroine’s lover, rendered harmless and subordinate in Słowak’s paintings, allows the relationships depicted to be viewed through the lens of Freud’s fatalistic model. This model portrays romantic relationships as inherently narcissistic and, therefore, inevitably unfulfilled and dysfunctional. This displaced continuation of a desire that has been unfulfilled since childhood suggests, as Agata Bielińska wrote, that “the original, irreplaceable ideal object exists only as lost. The narcissistic love that strives for it is therefore necessarily an impossible love, whose flawed nature manifests itself in widespread ‘psychological impotence’: in the split between tenderness and desire, overestimating the object and humiliating it”.[4]
Although the artist’s own image regularly reappears in her new paintings, and other real faces are easily discernible, even if presented in a mutilated form, anonymous or simply fictional characters – placeholder faces – are appearing with increasing frequency. This makes it all the more worthwhile to resist the temptation to perceive the painter's subsequent works through an autobiographical lens, and instead to view them with cool detachment. In doing so, as in the paintings of a monk pulling his lips towards the Virgin Mary’s breast or a martyr being torn apart, we may unexpectedly – with horror rather than hope – see our own reflection.
Text by Piotr Policht
Translated by Jarosław Fejdych
[1] L’amore è come un dipintore. Un buono dipintore, se e’ dipigne bene, tanto delettano gli uomini le sue dipinture, che nel contemplarle rimangon sospesi, e qualche volta in tal modo che e’ pare che e’ sieno posti in estasi e fuora di loro, e pare che e’ si dimentichino di loro medesimi. Cited from: G. Savonarola, Sermoni e prediche di F. Girolamo Savonarola, Firenze 1846, v. 1, p. 434–435.
[2] Comp. J. Sperling, Squeezing, Squirting, Spilling Milk: The Lactation of Saint Bernard and the Flemish Madonna Lactans (ca. 1430–1530), “Renaissance Quarterly”, v. 71, 2018, no. 3, pp. 868-918.
[3] M. Easton, Saint Agatha and the Sanctification of Sexual Violence, “Studies in Iconography”, v. 16, 1994, pp. 83-118.
[4] A. Bielińska, Poza zasadą narcyzmu. O miłości jako traumie horyzontalnej, „wunderBlock. Psychoanaliza i Filozofia”, 2022, no. 2, p. 145.
Agata Słowak (b. 1994, Busko-Zdrój, PL) graduated from the faculty of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She is also the winner of the Paszport Polityki (Polityka’s Passport) Award in 2022 in the Visual Arts category. Her solo exhibitions include: A Marriage of Heaven and Hell, BLUM, Tokyo (2024), Time is Love, Fortnight Institute, New York City (2023), and Only Our States, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw (2022). Her works were exhibited in group presentations, including Don’t hate the player, hate the game, Galeria Miejska BWA, Bielsko-Biała (2025), “Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures, BLUM, Los Angeles (2024), I saw the other side of the sun with you. Surrealists from Eastern Europe, European Arteast Foundation, London (2023), RAW, Vacancy Gallery, Shanghai (2022), WHAT DO YOU SEE, YOU PEOPLE, GAZING AT ME, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021), and Nine Lives, Fortnight Institute, New York (2021).
Agata Słowak, Oxytocin, 2025, Foksal Gallery Foundation, installation view, photo Bartosz Zalewski