Agata Bogacka: Interactionship | Edel Assanti
Some fields of colour in Agata Bogacka’s serene, calming paintings don’t touch at all. Some of these large strokes do meet, barely, and there’s a satisfying faint shift in tone. Looking at them, I couldn’t say exactly where one field stops and the other starts.
This show is Bogacka’s second exhibition with the Edel Assanti gallery, and the show notes claim the works are about “systems of domination”, about “power and resistance”. That seems too bombastic to me. What I saw is the aftermath of an argument, an afterglow.
Declarations 16 (2026)
Gerhard Richter feels like an important reference point: the squeegee-pulled abstracts where the mechanics of applying paint become the whole subject.
It’s a strange fit, thinking about it now, with the last show I saw in these rooms: Yukultji Napangati and two other Papunya Tula artists, whose paintings hide sacred knowledge behind abstraction.
Less highbrow: it also reminded me of the bucket-fill tool in MS Paint, from school computer lessons: pick two colours, drag one into the other, watch it blend in bands.
The painting I kept coming back to was the most minimal thing in the room, pictured above: mostly raw, unprimed canvas, with just a faint shading of white pulled across one corner. The most serene - the calmest.
Agata Bogacka: Interactionship is at Edel Assanti (London). 4-26 September 2026