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Welcome to my e-gallery. See more in my atelier in Warsaw, capital of Poland.

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I would like to thank my family and friends for their help during the preparation of the catalogue.

Why?! Why do beautiful and young people at the threshold of their lives, and throughout all their lives, often full of difficult moments, doubts and failures, stand in front of a piece of canvas, which is for them the universe, and paint? They resign from carriers, promotions, cheap fame, elusive successes, and paint. Under pressure of media and “visionaries” foretelling the end of the painting…they paint. Resistant to pseudo-modernity, “installations”, computer productions, combated by the institutions created for the development of culture, and financed with the taxpayers’ money…they paint.

Halina Kwiecińska-Bonikowska paints. Everything else one would like to write about her is this “else”, “beside”… I have been observing her artistic doings for a long time. Being familiar with painting for a dozen years or so I realise how difficult it is for artists to go beyond their own imagination, to cross their own threshold of artistic language, what enemy the routine and repetitiveness of themes can become, or else the pressure from the market. That’s why I look at each new painting of Mrs. Halina with recognition and I do appreciate the fact that she manages to avoid these traps, surprising customers with new areas of sensitivity, formal solutions and the mastery with which she builds the dramaturgy of her paintings.

In the history of the artists’ development flowers require special attention, or rather, what she can express with the help of the flowers in her paintings. It is her paintings that made me see flowers in a different light – this subject is often neglected by numerous so called “art connoisseurs”. Flowers serve to the artist as an excuse to present events full of great dramaturgy and emotion. These flowers are personified, there is drama hidden behind them, together with fight, love, passion and beauty – as in a very interesting life. Mrs. Halina has proven that painting constitutes a great power of spirit, irreplaceable by “novelties”.

Because PAINTING is METAPHYSICS. If, while treating painting so seriously and intensively, Halina Kwiecińska-Bonikowska faces social problems, acting for the benefit of poor children, and deals in her paintings with philosophical and ultimate matters, illustrating the Great Apocalypse, she seems to be a fulfilled person. And when she says that “the desire for beauty makes me go back to painting flowers – this wonder of nature amazing with the variety of forms, colours and shapes” – I do believe her.

Leszek Juriewicz art dealer, “Znak” Art Gallery

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