Good Mourning

Courtesy Galerie Sébastien Bertrand

Sébastien Bertrand is pleased to present Good Mourning, Mirella Jaworska’s (2001, Lidzbark Warmiński, Poland) first personal exhibition at the gallery. The title plays on the homophony between ‘morning’ and ‘mourning’: these paintings have the uncertain light of waking, when the dream is fading and reality is not quite there yet.

Having studied art history in Warsaw and subsequently painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Jaworska draws inspiration from a careful study of the early Renaissance masters – from Piero della Francesca to Giotto, and from Giovanni Bellini to Paolo Uccello. This heritage can be felt in her painting through a restrained, often somber palette, where light and texture matter as much as the subjects themselves, and where the brushstrokes remain visible. The oil paint, muted and velvety, allows the texture of the canvas to breathe.

Faces emerge from a black background, almost faded, as if seen through a veil or a pane of glass (Forget-me-not, Girl Smoking, Concentration problems). Flowers, skulls, and cigarettes (Flowers I and II, Vanitas, Burning) revive the tradition of vanitas, but without solemnity. Elsewhere, objects are left suspended: a coat draped over a chair, an open booklet showing a photograph (Everything I won’t know). Others belong to her everyday surroundings – a palette, a tube of paint, a cigarette – placed at the edge of the canvas like small still lives (Unresolved Matters, Studio Suicide).

This inner world is populated by recurring figures: a jockey and his horse crossing the canvas like a memory, a sphinx (Oedipus and the Sphinx), a chair pierced by a heart and letters from a child’s alphabet (Early Education). Between Italy and Warmia, whose landscapes shaped her childhood, and between European tradition and contemporary exploration, childhood, desire and loss coexist. Following a year-long exchange at Joshibi University in Tokyo, where she deepened her interest in Japanese painting, these works from 2026 also explore the ways an image can emerge, recede, and remain suspended between presence and disappearance.

Good Mourning thus offers a gentle form of mourning, made up of presences that fade without disappearing.