Pictorial Narratives in the Visual Artwork of Iwona Siwek-Front

Abstract

The paper analyses the artwork of Iwona Siwek-Front, a little-known artist, who is especially interesting due to the transmedial nature of her artistic expression. Her work is part of a modern trend in art at the borderline between literature, film, and painting. The relation between artworks and the poetics of comics is studied here by using a set of instruments consisting of cognitive comic book poetics enriched with the assumptions of the psychoanalysis of drawing, as well as the tools proposed by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen for reading multimodal utterances. The study reveals that the artist employs unconventional arrangements of comic-style panels, in which the viewer becomes a co-creator of the narrative, while the satirical and column-like elements give the works a distinctive character. The results of the analysis provide a better understanding of the mechanisms of integrating different artistic forms into contemporary art and indicate directions for further research on transgeneric practices in the visual arts. A careful analysis of Siwek-Front’s works allows for greater understanding of the evolution of contemporary artistic forms.