The artists on show employ various strategies of mimicry: accommodation, blending into the environment (both natural and social), or an indifferent standing-aside, only to momentarily join into the game at the first opportunity. The need for camouflage makes visible their incompatibility, or a hostility of clashing worlds.

The case of Bartek Buczek’s works suggests the adage that the best defence is a good offence. However, the artist does not charge himself, but leaves the dirty job to a villain – the role is played by his black metal alter ego. In Michalina Bugaj’s, camouflage surfaces in a more literal assimilation into nature. A gentle, pacified nature leaves a mark on the artist which sometimes is painful. The mark makes visible the primal tension between a natural beauty and an or- namental aesthetisation. The theme of mimicry is developed in the work of Maciej Cholewa by allowing a viewer’s sight to wander in search of a human figure skilfully camouflaged by thickets. His work has the

greatest relevance to the theme of masking and the figure of an observer investigating the language of documentary narrative.

In viewing Ewa Sadowska’s pieces, we spy on the artist in a network of interpersonal relations – on a micro-scale of a family, in her case. We are not far from the macro scale and the question: how do the contemporary young artists function in a wider spectrum of social relations; are they noticed, or, indeed, appreciated? Kamil Kukla begins his paintings with organic forms, transforming them to the point of their erasure in compliance with an abstract painter’s stroke. Art takes revenge and starts to dictate its terms to nature.