About this work

A painterly interpretation of a passage from the poetry of Halina Poświatowska, in which the experience of love is presented as a force that is at once fragile and impossible to tame. The titles of the two parts of the diptych — 1. “I Seized Love to Break It” and 2. “But It Was Supple, It Wound Around Our Hands” — are drawn directly from the poet’s verse as paraphrases, becoming not merely a commentary but an integral part of the work’s semantic structure.

The composition is built around a dialogue between two canvases, which function as an inseparable whole. At its centre are black, featureless silhouettes evoke the aesthetics of shadow theatre showing a scene of a psychological and emotional space in which a story of love unfolds. Love, which the lyrical subject attempts to “break”, proves flexible and enduring; rather than being destroyed, it “winds around our hands”.
The garden of the title can be read as a metaphor for a relationship that grows and blossoms.