At the joint exhibition of Janina Żemojtel and Karolina Freino, representations of the body emerge from abstract imagery, evoking themes of intimacy, closeness, and desire. The title of the exhibition, and also of Freino’s work, It warms without burning, is borrowed from the poem “Firesmoke” by Kae Tempest. This 2019 love poem explores passion, desire, and love for a woman through the symbolism of fire and smoke. It ends with the words: “But now comes this fire to cleanse and restore us / To fuel us and calm us and push us both forwards, forwards.”
In her titular work, Karolina Freino focuses on warmth as a trace of intimacy and closeness. Using a thermal imaging camera, the artist creates a video-photographic installation composed of small-scale domestic footage—ephemeral thermal photographs of bed sheets and a mattress, still radiating the heat left by a couple’s bodies. The colorful thermographs record infrared radiation, revealing otherwise invisible aspects of closeness: the touch of skin, the warmth shared between bodies. These gradually fading traces of presence become a visual record of intimacy. These seemingly abstract images intertwine with Janina Żemojtel’s paintings, constructing a narrative of bodily and emotional revelation.
In Żemojtel’s work, male nudes are interwoven with abstract compositions and landscapes. Although the presented selection of paintings may initially seem formally and thematically inconsistent, her works created over several decades are bound by shared compositional and chromatic solutions. Amid translucent glazes and thick impasto applications, the male figure seems to appear and disappear, challenging the boundaries between figuration and abstraction. These large paintings, often referencing traditional iconography, frequently explore powerful emotions such as mourning, passion, or desire.
Freino’s affirming and love-driven work echoes Żemojtel’s painting in both its color palette and compositional engagement with the limits of bodily representation. Yet the intimate, small-scale, smartphone-recorded domestic scenes evoke a sense of privacy—and even voyeurism. In contrast, Żemojtel, drawing on various painting traditions, seems to endow the act of looking with a sense of significance and gravitas. Despite generational and stylistic differences, the artists’ dialogue—rich in subtlety—reflects on the boundaries of representing corporeality and emotion.
Artist Biographies:
Janina Żemojtel (b. 1931 in Vilnius – d. 2004 in Wrocław)
Janina Żemojtel worked in oil painting, drawing inspiration from classical art and post-impressionism. Through color, texture, and composition, she conveyed the expressive power of the human body, becoming one of the key figures of the new Polish figuration movement. In her later years, she turned to abstract works dominated by bold fields of pure color. In 1956, she graduated from the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław under Eugeniusz Geppert. From 1966 to 1972, she taught at the State Secondary School of Fine Arts in Wrocław, and later lectured at the Pedagogical Study of her alma mater. Since 1961, she was a member of the Krąg Group and the Wrocław Group.
Karolina Freino (b. 1978 in Poznań)
Karolina Freino works across multiple media, primarily in public space. She studied sculpture at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, the Edinburgh College of Art (School of Sculpture), and received an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from Bauhaus University in Weimar. She is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Sculpture and Art Mediation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. From 2014–2017, she completed her doctoral research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Faculty of Media Art) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia). She has been awarded scholarships by, among others, the Alfred Töpfer Stiftung and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
