Its design was prepared by Gosia Bartosik. The artist’s mural appeared on the circular wall of the Arsenal City Gallery pavilion at 1 Evangelska St. The huge work is colourful and the motifs appearing on it allude to man as a member of the community.
The Pavilion on Ewangelicka Street in Poznań is an important part of the city’s cultural map. Built in 2011, the building was created as a space for cultural events and today operates as a branch of the Arsenal City Gallery. Built on a circular plan, the building gained a new look at the end of 2024 with a large-format mural by Poznań-based artist Gosia Bartosik.
The author of the mural is known for raising important social issues through visual art and street drawing. When designing the mural for the Pavilion, she drew inspiration from the Pavilion’s surroundings and activities. She even held a workshop with the gallery team to define the vision for the piece together. This led to the design of a colourful mural with the idea of sharing, openness and strengthening human connections.
The mural was inspired by Pavilion visitors, regulars, people who work at the institution and, perhaps most importantly, the events that happen there. Concerts, meetings, talks, films, theatre, the audiovisual fabric, everything in between. The biggest inspiration, however, was my personal relationship with the Pavilion, as above, as an artist, viewer and former employee, I was poring over the circular building with an awareness of the need to include all the senses (…) all the variety of people, stimuli and themes, the openness to the new and different, the dialogue, safety and love in all shapes. I think a lot of this pulsated and combined with my way of communicating with images – this mural was created,” admits the artist.
The work took ten days to complete. In the end, we see a colourful composition that combines vivid colours with fluid forms, emphasising both the movement and the communal nature of the space in which it was painted. The artist admits that she created the mural in the same way as the smaller format works she creates, only this time she had to use five-litre buckets instead of paint jars. The entire work was realised in such a way as to be weatherproof.
The choice of colour palette was spontaneous, including a base, strangely greyish blue, which was to be the closest to the colour of the Pavilion. Black, white and orange were also a certainty. Also jumped into the shopping basket were purple, a soft yellow, maroon and green, which in the final colour clash with the wall was not used. Ultimately, the colours were supposed to be ‘pure’, but the creative process triggered the breaking of this purity and the mixing of shades,” says Gosia Bartosik.
Her large-format work is adjacent to the playground and the Avenue of the Order of the Smile. The artist decided early on in her design work that the neighbourhood of the building had to be reflected in the mural. The building itself, by being separated from the nearby architecture, allowed the colour palette to be treated with greater freedom.
Colour dictated itself, intuitively, without playing with the meaning of colours. This instinctive choice of palette, with small baseline assumptions that organised and dictated further steps, ended up depicting what I cared about most – bathing in the intoxication of multiple meanings, mixing and contrasting emotions, the artist adds.
The mural was realised with the support of the City of Poznań’s budgetary funds. Partners in the undertaking are the companies Demiurg and Boutique Office, which were responsible for the renovation and preparation of the wall for the mural. Both companies have been involved in sponsoring and patronising art – especially street art – for years, supporting artists and their work. Through activities such as this, they create space for creativity, promote young talent and contribute to an open, friendly city.
Demiurg and Boutique Office have also in the past organised vernissages of young artists in spaces they themselves have built, including the vernissages of Pavel Swansky, Noriaki, Eskaer, Biosme Brocki and Someart. They plan to return to this form of support in the near future. What’s more, Boutique Office makes its investments in collaboration with artists – another such building is to be built on Dąbrowskiego Street in Poznań.
photos: Szymon Kavka
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