Publication date: 13.11.2023

The work encompasses several of the artist’s central themes and interests, using the language of both abstraction and figuration. The nude, as the title suggests, is presented in a highly abstracted manner. The elongated, slender body of a woman is cropped, leaving large parts such as the head, buttocks or hands outside the frame. In addition, the naked body aligns with all four edges of the canvas, creating a frame that defines the space for a pulsating blue rectangular shape. The light emanating from the ‘painting within a painting’ is a reference to the transcendence expressed in icon painting and sacred images. The physicality of the figure is accentuated by the artist’s use of yellow, pink and red tones, as well as by the accentuation of anatomical parts of the body, such as the knees, abdomen, chest and elbows, in which it is possible to identify features that are characteristic of a completely different genre of painting, such as landscape. In the knees, the shapes of mountains are outlined, the abdomen resembles a hill with a horizon line, and other parts suggest similarities to rock formations. The naked body, almost palpable in its sensual physicality, can also be interpreted as the sum of fragmented, stylised parts, distinguished by colour, line and surface, moving them towards abstraction. As in other paintings by Nowosielski, Nude resonates with the sacred.