Opening: 24 July 2026, 7:00 pm
On view until: 28 August 2026
Curator: Paulina Winiarska
The Code of the Third Matter explores the intersection of scientific inquiry and lived, inner experience. A practicing physician as well as an artist, Bogna Bartkowiak-Trepka brings analytical thinking into dialogue with her self-developed concept of the Third Matter, combining it with intuition, artistic expression, and a deeply personal visual language. These two practices—medicine and art—ultimately converge around a question that remains both fundamental and unresolved: What is it that makes us alive?
Bartkowiak-Trepka proposes a model of three forms of matter. The first is the body, the second the mind, while the Third Matter belongs to neither realm. It remains elusive, resisting clear definition. It might be described as energy or intuition, yet neither term fully captures its nature. Rather than a fixed concept, the Third Matter occupies a threshold between the tangible world—what can be seen, touched, and experienced—and the spiritual dimension. Central to the artist’s thinking is Daoist philosophy, with its insistence on the impossibility of naming the ultimate source. As the Dao De Jing states: “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao.” The Third Matter functions in much the same way: it is an experience of transition that continually escapes definition.
Faced with this uncertainty, the artist turns to a language that extends beyond words—the language of symbols and colour. In the alchemical tradition, transformation unfolds through three successive stages, represented by black, white, and red. The final stage, rubedo, signifies culmination: the reconciliation of opposites and the achievement of wholeness. Throughout the exhibition, red becomes a threshold colour, marking the passage between different layers of reality.
This symbolic framework also resonates with the work of Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist who, like Bartkowiak-Trepka, moved between scientific research and artistic practice. In The Red Book, widely regarded as his most significant literary work, Jung documented years of exploration into the deeper structures of the psyche. Here too, red marks the space between conscious experience and that which remains beyond its limits.
The number three is equally central to the exhibition. For Jung, it symbolized psychic movement, transformation, and becoming. Three is the first number capable of generating a stable form: two points create a line, while the third opens a space. The triangle—the simplest closed geometric figure—embodies this principle. The characteristic fan-shaped image produced by a convex ultrasound transducer reveals a striking visual affinity with this triadic form, connecting the symbolic language of the exhibition with the artist’s medical practice.
The works gathered in The Code of the Third Matter occupy the intersection of medicine and art. Oil paintings derived from X-ray films transform diagnostic images into painterly visions, becoming vehicles for approaching what cannot be directly represented. Alongside them, the exhibition includes a series of smaller sculptural objects and a monumental obelisk installed in the garden.
The artist describes these artefacts as instruments for investigating the Third Matter. They are neither props nor decorative objects, but tools of inquiry. Existing outside a fixed historical moment, they seem equally capable of belonging to a distant past or an imagined future. They may be encountered as archaeological discoveries or speculative prototypes. Moving through the exhibition, visitors themselves assume the role of researchers, joining an investigation that has occupied the artist for many years.
The Third Matter ultimately resists every attempt at definition. Instead, it manifests through the material presence of painting, sculpture, light, and reflection. Entering the exhibition means entering red: a state of openness, uncertainty, and readiness for discovery.
Paulina Winiarska
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