Painter Zuzanna Bartoszek (b. 1994, Poznań) hasn’t done many interviews. As I read up on her work, I found a conversation from six years ago, one as part of an exhibition during Krakow Photomonth that same year. There she talks about psychological processes and how she is interested in them, both those happening within herself and others. Besides evocative paintings, she writes, and her writings carry this urge to penetrate minds, be they those of humans or animals, and delve into another matter. She said it scares her that everyone is alone with their feelings. She proceeds to refer to Instagram as a vanity market, a Satan’s church.

Under the Spiky Sun, her exhibition at the Contemporary Fine Arts gallery in Basel, revisits those twisted and otherworldly notions she’s always held within reach. Each canvas comes with its own blurb, but as the exhibition material reads, she’s not into any make-believe, insisting that the abstraction to her stories boils down to how she felt or what she saw. It’s metaphorical, unlike the perhaps surrealistic label she’s sometimes given, where the emphasis would be the extraordinary stretch.

Like Bartoszek, I’ve long found comfort in solitude, particularly at a younger age. When others were prone to non-stop social collectivity, there was something shimmering with intrigue around the idea of just being by oneself, preoccupied by one’s own twisted reality. Perhaps digesting the daily dose of observations. In Bartoszek’s case, her home-prone presence only heightened at the age of 12, as she developed autoimmune diseases and lost her hair. To step out in the sun was and is to be greeted by spikes: it becomes a symbol of the differentiation from others, of the solitary she is as her sensitive skin forbids her from even merely enjoying what everyone else loves. This first opened her door into writing in the shape of diaries, becoming an outlet for self-expression and likely a coping strategy for the outside world. She’s big on empathy, stressing how her mother was too “a huge empath” and that it comes naturally to her to intertwine someone else’s perspective, something that is mirrored in her paintings and her texts.

Works like Fentanyl Fold (2025-2026) is one such example of locality and the tendency to apply surroundings into her artistic environment. During her time in Berlin, it was a frequent sight to encounter fentanyl users along the streets. Sights others would either judge or reject through ill-will, Bartoszek sort of captures and distills into her art through curiosity. Renderings become pondering, maybe the result of such, or the very image of one isolated frame, articulating an ongoing part of her thinking process. She’s vocal about “expression instead of narration”, emphasising her reflective mind rather than finished thoughts and paving the way for metaphors to emerge within viewers when faced with the artwork.

Under the Spiky Sun underscores persistent contradictions: we see parallels that make sense and some that don’t. Neo-sci-fi-fed surroundings coexist next to an apocalyptic future, like in Kids and Phones (2026), with its muted peculiarity around the slender figures indulged in their digital apparatus.The narrative of each painting weighs in on a million different storylines and possible narrative structures as such, but doesn’t boil into any distinct one. Like the children hunched over their phones, the motifs may be future-scary, hinting at the screen-frantic world we live in, but they might just as well illustrate a shared moment. Metaphors are endless, floating between one another, without ever straightening out any questions. We’re just left wanting something more and grasp what’s really going on inside her skin.