A Polonia ball is one of the tenderest images of Polishness abroad, and Kus turns it into a story about how we manufacture our own memories. It is a montage rather than a portrait of one evening: the figures look cut out of different years and pasted into a single uneasy frame. The man in the middle is Michał Dymny, the artist's husband, at the Millennium Ball in Chicago in 2000. The suit is a size too big and he is visibly out of his depth, which is exactly why Kus painted him: he stands for Poland and this whole part of Europe at the door of the Western world, nominally already inside and still not at home in it.
The painter
Agata Kus (born 1987) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, where she took her degree in 2012 and her doctorate in 2018. She won the Grand Prix at the WRO Media Art Biennale in 2015 and came first in the Young Art Compass ranking in 2020. Her paintings, classical figuration with an appetite for technical experiment, are in the collections of MOCAK in Krakow and the National Museum in Gdańsk, among others.