Gentlemen

“Gentlemen” by Magdalena Nowatkowska is a meeting of form and emptiness. Two faceless, nameless silhouettes intersect like pipes in a mechanical organism. One lifts its head upward, the other rests horizontally, as if their relationship were inscribed in geometry itself: above and below, dominance and submission, presence and absence.

The black where the eyes should be turns the gaze into an abyss. Instead of a face—a sign; instead of individuality—anonymity. “Gentlemen” become figures, symbols of status stripped of human warmth. Their corporeality is reduced to construction—rectangle, line, crossing systems—man reduced to a scheme.

The colors are muted, cool, with a single flash of orange appearing like a foreign intruder, an impulse disturbing the balance. In this simplicity, tension is born—an irony toward the title. For these “gentlemen” are not majestic but stripped of gravity, becoming shadows of their own meaning.

It is a painting about relationships and emptiness, about structure and its fragility. About the fact that hierarchies exist even when the human disappears from the image.