Impediment

About the work:
Impediment revisits an archival image of the destroyed Warsaw ghetto, where almost nothing remained but fractured ground and the traces of lives erased. In the painting, this history resurfaces through layered fields that alternately obscure and reveal what lies beneath, echoing the city’s own cycles of destruction and rebuilding.
The red and blue vertical forms loosely reimagine skeletal figures from the original photograph — markers of presence transformed into abstract pillars within the shifting terrain. Thin pink lines thread through the composition, referencing the colour-coded system used in the camps and touching on the ongoing vulnerability of communities historically targeted and silenced.
Rather than depicting a single moment, Impediment reflects on how trauma accumulates in layers: built over, painted over, but never entirely gone.