Anna Reinert – Where is Catherine?

A question posed in this way makes us begin a search. In Anna Reinert's latest series of paintings, the emptiness of architectural landscapes is now making place to narration. Before, Reinert, following the mode of "La citta ideale", has introduced the renaissance-like order and harmony into the modern city; now, scenes peopled by many characters, almost like from a film, have appeared next to tranquil and desolate cityscapes. However, the motif of the eponymous absence is constantly present in both cases. The inkling of the search disappears amidst the crowd, depicted by Reinert as Siegfried Kracauer's "mass ornament". This is how the dialectic of presence and lack has been transferred from the geometry of solids onto the realism of genre scenes.

The latest exhibition of Reinert's works presents murals and canvases. Her illusionistic "Urbanic" paintings, now non-existent, from the stair wells of CCA Laznia /Bathhouse in Gdansk and CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw created an illusion of depth and colourful corridors and streets, opening before the viewer. This time, however, Reinert uses the "zoom" effect and presents the details of a large-scale landscape to her viewer. Here, the canvas functions like a loupe from a thriller. The gripping narrative of the "Where is Catherine?" series breaks with the cool rhetoric of modernism, which has to date been ascribed to Anna Reinert.

text: Justyna Kowalska