Agnieszka Handzel & Pawel Kordaczka – Paintings

Agnieszka Handzel was one of the winners of the German Paderborn Volksbank Young European Artist Award in 2001. She is a graduate of 
University of Silesia Art Institute, where she studied painting and ceramics. Drawing as the means for her artistic expression is important to her. “I see drawing as neither an end in itself, nor as preliminary sketching leading up to a painting. My drawings form an integral part of my pictures, providing the counterpoint to the areas of paint. My eye hovers over our everyday life, concentrating on people and their emotional experiences. More often than not, I portray women caught up in various situations and connected to their environment by the means of an apparently trivial prop, a gesture or a glance. Occasionally, the woman is accompanied by another figure and subsequently, a story is born” says Agnieszka.

Pawel Kordaczka was among the winners of the 2001 German Paderborn Volksbank Young European Artist Award. In 2008 he received an award from the Polish weekly Nowy Czas After graduation from University of Silesia Art Institute he was invited for a year lectureship in its Fine Art Department. Currently based in London. “My main means of expression are oil painting and pencil drawing, while both the composition and the content are influenced by the ancient art of the Orthodox icon. I have aimed for many years to capture and to preserve that particular brand of spirituality, while veering more and more towards the abstract. My sacral series of paintings had its beginnings in the landscape of my native Bieszczady and
 the tiny Orthodox churches dotted all around it. Slowly but surely, I stepped inside those unprepossessing temples looking up towards the icon itself; the image at the very heart of the Orthodox tradition. Notwithstanding the fact that over the years my paintings have got deeper and deeper into the realm of abstraction and have moved from the sacred towards the mundane, a small grain of the original inspiration remains” says Pawel Kordaczka.