Self as Solvent

ARTEFACT Gallery is delighted to announce Self as Solvent, a solo exhibition by Polish-born Berlin-based painter Jagoda Bednarsky, on view from April 24 – June 25, 2026.

Alluding to the medium’s inherent solvency, the artist sees the self as fluid and permeable, in a state of constant negotiation. New paintings and watercolor works will be unveiled for the first time, emerging from the artist’s ongoing engagement with a boundless archive of images, exploring the ways they shape memory and desire. Through a process of appropriation and reconfiguration, Bednarsky draws from art history, popular culture, and personal experience, dismantling familiar visual languages and recombining them into unexpected compositions. Recognizable motifs emerge only to quickly disappear within the dense fields of color and movement. In the dialogue between initial motifs and their transformed iterations, Bednarsky produces works that rethink the stories they reference. The artist expands: “In my paintings, I create order out of disorder through the repetition of motifs, gestures, and colors, following Jorge Luis Borges’s notion that repetition creates order.” For Self as Solvent , Bednarsky has produced a new suite of watercolors that embody her singular perspective on contemporary experience and visual culture. The exhibition includes new works from the artist’s ongoing Shadowland series, reflecting on conventional notions of femininity and motherhood, while recognizing its natural form. Ranging from grey-toned water fountains to brightly colored compositions resembling hilly landscapes, the works appear ordinary at first, but reveal themselves as breasts arranged in cascading stacks. Founder of ARTEFACT , Anna Rosa Thomae, reflects, “I first encountered the watercolors a little over six years ago, and was absolutely taken by their intimate humor and luminosity. Quietly perfected in Jagoda’s studio for many years, and I am so honored to now show them at the gallery.” Throughout her practice, themes of self-image, wellness culture, motherhood, voyeurism, and femininity often intersect with design elements and theatrical fragments that suggest incomplete or imagined narratives. Across this new body of work, Bednarsky transforms the apparent excess of contemporary visual culture into a painterly language of repetition, variation, and reinvention. At once playful and analytical, the works probe the potential of images and their role in the construction of identity, while remaining infinitely open to reinterpretation. One is invited to linger and look beyond first impressions, discovering how meaning emerges gradually through memory, material, and imagination.

What to expect:
Painting