Exhibition open from October 4, 2025 to October 31, 2025
Opening: October 11, 2025, 6:00 PM
In the prose of Bruno Schulz, red emerges as one of the most resonant colors, carrying with it an intensity of affect and emotion. The exhibition’s title, Red Eyelids, evokes the state of prolonged wakefulness, sleep deprivation, and an overflow of thought—signs of a body and mind under strain. The eye, as the primary organ of perception, connects the individual to the external world, while the eyelid operates as a regulator and shield: a natural filter that mediates not only external phenomena but the entire spectrum of sensory experience.
Animal forms morph into human ones, echoing Schulz’s vision of reality as unstable, pliable, and prone to deformation—charged with uncertainty and always on the verge of sudden, unpredictable transformation. Birds serve as a central leitmotif, looming above the human figure in grotesque, dreamlike guise. Their presence gestures toward an attempt to access “the vibrating life of the essence of reality, concealed beneath the masses of what is ordinary and mundane, and therefore superficial and insignificant.”¹
The Inner Boiling painting cycle expands this tension through the motif of insects, drawn into a frenzy by blinding light. Landing on the organ of vision itself, they embody the intrusion of fear, amplifying the discomfort of being observed. The boundary between seeing and being seen, between presence and passivity, becomes a catalyst for inner unrest. The overload of stimuli culminates in exhaustion and in the temptation to close one’s eyes. Red Eyelids here mark the fragile threshold between perception and withdrawal, between vigilance and the drift into half-sleep.
¹ See entry Birds in: W. Bolecki, J. Jarzębski, S. Rosiek, Słownik schulzowski, Gdańsk 2006.