Agata Kus, Promises

The show ran from 3 July to 23 August and was put together by Michalina Domoń. The promises of the title are the ones that were kept and the ones that came to nothing. Kus goes back to childhood and adolescence, to the years when somebody else writes your part before you get a word in. Drawings and large pastels made for the occasion hung alongside the paintings.

The four that went from my collection were Zawodniczka (The Athlete), Trening (Training), Milenijny Bal Polonijny (The Millennium Polonia Ball) and I'm fine. Big canvases, all from 2024, every one of them about a body with something to prove: to the family, to the stopwatch, or to itself. And every one stops before Kus tells you how it ended. In I'm fine everything is fine, obviously. Isn't it?

The day after the opening, on 4 July, I gave a talk in Sopot about why anyone collects art now. I gave it in a room full of her paintings, so I did not have to look far for examples. The show closed with a finissage on 22 August and the paintings were back in Warsaw at the beginning of September. That is what I keep them for. Not to hang on my own walls and nowhere else.