Study No 2 Catharsis Original Painting Pastels

A contemporary response to Stanisław Wyspiański's "Mietek Resting on His Hands" (1904), National Museum in Kraków

Catharsis is the second work in a twelve-painting cycle by London-based artist Jarek Filipowicz, each piece engaging directly with a specific canonical work of European Modernism. This painting takes as its source Stanisław Wyspiański's 1904 pastel portrait of his son Mietek — a defining image of the Young Poland (Młoda Polska) movement, and a work whose intimacy and psychological restraint have made it one of the most recognised child portraits in Polish Symbolist art.

Filipowicz holds close to Wyspiański's original composition — the same lowered head, the same crossed forearms, the same quiet collapse into stillness — while entirely reworking its emotional register through colour. Where Wyspiański's palette is muted and interior, Filipowicz pushes the scene into a hot, radiating field of red and coral, transforming a moment of childhood fatigue into one of release. The painting is semi-autobiographical: a retrospective study of the artist's own turbulent childhood, imagined as the instant the internal storm finally stills and the last held tension breaks as a single tear.

The result is not homage in the conventional sense, but a genuine act of translation — testing whether a century-old visual language of restrained emotion can still carry the weight of a lived, personal history.

Self-taught, Filipowicz began painting in 2014 following a career in business. His work has been exhibited at the Koppel Project Gallery, Holborn (The A5 Show, 2018), with In Cahoots Arts 2025 and 2025, London (XYZ Gallery, 2025), and at FLUX Exhibition, The Bomb Factory, Marylebone (2024 and 2025).