Agnieszka Kastelik

Agnieszka Kastelik was born in 1989 in Zywiec, Poland. In 2014, she graduated from the Cracow Fine Arts Academy in painting, from the studio of Professor Andrzej Bednarczyk. The artist started with painting and after several years of experimentation and research, she turned to other forms of expression. Her interest in collecting random objects and especially for family sentimental junk strongly influenced this change. Kastelik realized that only through the object, she could express what she wants and feels. “A little cup of memories is worth more than an ocean of success”. She uses mainly the technique of assemblage but creates also sculptures, which she associates with painting, drawing and photography. In her work, she uses mostly trivial, found objects. By recycling them, she gives them a second life, a new breath full of poetry. In 2018, she created the scenography for the film Teodycea by Justyna Miodonska.

For the artist, the found object is a memory vector. The subject of Kastelik’s work is based on her memories or those of others, borrowed from relationships with places, which over time change constantly (courtyards, houses, mysterious places not only from the artist’s childhood). Objects –kind of time-marked findings – are an important part of the artist’s work. Wojciech Kubiak wrote about Kastelik’s works: 

Old objects, which the artist used to make her installations, do not always have a strong emotional charge. Most of the time we move among frivolous objects (keys, postcards, bricks, cupboards, old window frames, fences) that can be treated as such culturally. However, their disposition, their juxtaposition, and their stylization evoke in us a feeling of sadness and longing for what is important in the tradition: the family, the empathy, the intergenerational understanding, but also the compassion, the memory of the wrong, of the pain of a tragic past. Through the association with an object that bears the traces of memory, a souvenir, an imprint of history, we can move to the places where the author takes us.”