Martyna Benedyka

Country
Poland
City
Warsaw

To me, the fact that no two photographic prints are ever exactly the same is a perfect analogy of how I view painting. Photography has taught me that memory is fragile and uncertain and through my painted surfaces memories are recorded and transformed. Modest in scale and subject, my works become fleeting moments of distorted reality.

Examining ideas of existence and being, I look for the essence of a person through the essence of an object. The camera becomes a link between an intense description of the world of things and my own response to it. My works are fragments that act like poetic signs; I would like to encourage people to slow down and to see the poetry of everyday life. Through the process of cumulative observation some of my favourite motifs are endlessly copied while others, once pushed to the edge, simply vanish. The diversity of my work unites the idea of looking behind what is seen, which is my main concern.

Family Portrait


 

Don’t Forget You’re Going To Die is a photographic story project, inspired by “A Brave And Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou and so-called killed negatives (negatives of rejected images that were punctured with a hole puncher) by American photographers that were systematically destroyed in the 1930s.

The collection I am building is personal, almost intimate, and very broad at the same time. The idea behind this project is finding the metaphor for the unexplained and incomplete; in objects, nature, people and situations.

Whereas a picture usually documents reality, it can also hide it, so that it becomes inaccessible and the only thing we can do is interpret, like dreams, which in the end is just speculation.

Quote
I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

G. O'Keeffe