Women

The painting “Women” by Magdalena Nowatkowska can be read as a continuation and complement to the earlier canvas “Gentlemen.” Both works are built from a similar formal language—simplified silhouettes, geometrized bodies, the absence of individual features—yet their arrangement and internal relationships differ fundamentally.

In “Gentlemen,” we encountered intersecting lines, with hierarchy embedded in the composition: one figure was “above,” the other “below,” suggesting dominance, subordination, the mechanics of power. In “Women,” the artist reverses this logic. The figures stand side by side, almost like mirror reflections. Their vertical arrangement and symmetry give the painting a sense of balance, community, and coexistence.

Although the faces remain empty, and the black inserts in place of eyes remove individuality, a different accent emerges here—relationship instead of solitude. The viewer is not confronted with an isolated figure, but with two forms that co-create a whole. Hierarchy disappears, giving way to an echo of sisterhood, closeness, or at least equal juxtaposition.

“Women” can thus be interpreted as a painting in which anonymity does not mean only the loss of identity, but also the possibility of belonging to a larger, symmetrical structure. It stands in contrast to “Gentlemen,” where a mechanized structure led to rivalry and differentiated positions.

Viewed together, the two works form a diptych on social relations: “Gentlemen”—about dominance and subordination; “Women”—about mirrored coexistence, which does not erase questions of identity, but shifts the emphasis in another direction.