She Did it too Well, Hiding in the Paper, and !–> One Day She Exploded with Sadness and Being Inadequate

• oil on canvas, 2023

Zlata Lebedz comes from Belarus and is currently a fifth-year student of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Katowice. The main theme that preoccupies her is the need to re-examine and re-inventory our knowledge about the world. Lebedz’s paintings are afterimages of situations that are part of the cognitive process. The artist draws her inspiration primarily from within – from her own memories and experiences that have left a permanent mark in her mind. Her art is also heavily influenced by literary works written by women, especially those based on auto- biographical themes. In her paintings, Lebedz processes stories of various authorship, composing them through the prism of her own system of feeling and perceiving the world. The painting presented at the Review was inspired by a text by Belarusian poet Volhi Hapeyeva entitled “A Defense of Poetry in Times of Perpetual Exile”. “People living under undemocratic governments are used to internal exile – living in two parallel worlds, one of which is alien and ugly. Human rights, humanity, ethics and aesthetics are meaningless words in this other reality. No dictatorship is interested in art as such, because art is a means of critical thinking and learning, of education.”