Sylvia Batycka

About

Sylvia Batycka works centre on interplay between female narratives and aesthetics of absence. She was born in Kraków, got her formal art education in London, and currently she resides in Berlin.

Statement

Female narratives nest at the core of my practice. I am drawn to women who move through time as fugitives: nomads, solitary travellers, visitant - figures uncovered in archival photographs, garments, and objects that have endured beyond once intimate bodies. My work inhabits the space between presence and disappearance, addressing aesthetics of absence as a generative condition. I do not approach the past as fixed, whole, or recoverable. Instead, I work with its unstable residues: orphaned images, sartorial traces, displaced objects, and fragments of material culture that continue to carry affect even as they withhold the certainties of origin. My practices moves as an intermediary form - a passage between photography and painting , document and apparition, evidence and invention. If the photograph bears an indexical relation to a life once lived, painting unsettles that bond. It does not restore the lost subject, nor does it pretend to repair absence. Time is not arrested but reanimated and opened to renewed encounter. Within this visual language, the dress occupies a singular place. As a culturally overdetermined feminine form, it bears the sediments of identity, allure, performance, discipline, and self-fashioning. In the absence of the wearer, the dress becomes more than a remnant: it assumes the function of a surrogate body, a portrait articulated through vacancy. My recent work extends this enquiry from archival imagery to the archival apparatus itself. I am interested in the ways images and objects are preserved, named, classified, and withheld; in how intimacy is converted into evidence. In this sense, I work both with and against the archive - as archivist and counter-archivist at once. I preserve old presences, yet I also unsettle the systems that secure them within obedient categories. The archive is never neutral; it safeguards by estranging. My paintings intervene in that estrangement, returning atmosphere, ambiguity, and affect to what has been stilled by collection, classification, or display. I construct memorials, though never stable ones. My paintings are not records of what has been. They are thresholds: spaces of passage between what remains visible and what continues to recede, between past and present, photography and painting, body and garment, presence and absence.

Education

• 2019MFA Fine Art, University of the Arts London, London
• 2016Foundation in Art and Design, City Lit, London

Exhibitions

Recognition

Commissions

I take commissions that are in line with my practice - a portrait of your grandmother, or yourself, or your favourite dress, can be executed as a watercolour or oil painting. I thrive on moody expressions, nocturnal aesthetics and sartorial allure.