The painting goes back to a time when ending a pregnancy meant death by hanging, for any reason at all, even when a woman miscarried against her will. Her own family had to inform on her, because such a sinner was not fit to walk this vale of tears, and people kept a close eye on women who had been seen pregnant and then strangely had no child. A balloon bursts easily. So women turned to the devil, who, as Słowak tells it, made the better guardian: he drove off the cruel ones with his great tail and even wept tears of blood.
The painter
Agata Słowak (born 1994) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and in 2022 received a Polityka Passport, one of the most closely watched prizes in Polish art. She builds a private mythology out of the body, the occult and women's history, equally at home in tenderness and in threat, where the devil can turn out to be the better protector. She has shown with the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, the Fortnight Institute in New York and BLUM in Tokyo and Los Angeles.