The „I Meet Another One in His Face” exhibition presents the works of two of the last year’s graduates of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun Katarzyna Dumka (drawing) and Marta Szczepańska (painting). The title of the exhibition’s title refers to the idea developed by the philosophy of dialogue, focusing on relationships between people: Me-You. Meeting another person, talking with them, we stand in front of each other to see our faces. The face is the face is the starting point to make contact with another person. Katarzyna Dumka and Marta Szczepańska in spite of the formal differences and different means of expression focus their interests around the image of the face. Eye-catching, colourful presentations of young women portrayed by Marta Szczepańska seem to be situated on the opposite pole in relation to anxiety-provoking, monochrome images of homeless people. But when the colourful world of the elegant characters of the paintings by Marta Szczepańska is „broken” by her, and thus their faces lose the masks, in some way they correspond with the portraits of the homeless placed on black backgrounds by Katarzyna Dumka seemingly repulsive, but not enveloped by any curtain. Both become „an open book” i n which one can find both traces of harm and confusion, as well as the beauty and the truth about man. The exhibition is designed to encourage reflection on the nature of meeting face to face with another human being.
Danuta Pałys

Through the „Other” series, I refer the way in which the homeless are treated by the majority of society. Often times, they raise compassion, disgust, sorrow and even anger, embarrassment and often indifference. This specific approach makes them different often worse. The homeless are human beings, we forget about this, passing them in everyday life. Through the faithful reproduction of the facial features, through the faithful approach, I wanted to show their ordinariness and humanity. Just like everyone of us, the homeless are exposed to external factors, diseases, the effects of the passage of time. Just like us, they adopt different ways of behaviour, attitudes and expression, putting on the masks that separate them from the rest of society. Looking from a distance, we are not able to get to know people, and only on closer examination we notice how complicated human nature is. Same with my five portraits. From a distance, they form a coherent whole, describe the phenomenon of homelessness, and when you get closer, they define the particular Others. Only then do we see the details how many „features” there are in each person.
Katarzyna Dumka

I portrayed eight not accidental people in not accidental situations. These are the women whom I met in my life, repeatedly changing its direction. They are the women with whom I share a lot of broken and crumpled moments, probably we do not yet know all our faces, but we make our lives take different colours. So the selected scenes come from different moments of my life. Breaking, crumpling a human being is usually associated with destruction and tragedy, has a negative connotation. Połam-Pognieć (Break-Crumple) works are some kind of damage, but none of these images has a negative character. I wanted to say that no matter how broken we will be, such a situation can always be the beginning of something new. It can give us a new image of the reality we do not always want to see.”
Marta Szczepańska

opening of the exhibition 02.08.2016, 6pm
exhibition open until 31.08.2016
curator of the exhibition: Danuta Pałys