Blood on linen has always been washed quietly, in a tub, away from other people's eyes. Two washerwomen in blue aprons carry a wooden tub of bloodstained rags, people in striped prison clothes stand behind them, and a grey, fluid figure with a human face slides along the shore. In legend Lilith was Adam's first wife, the one who refused to obey him and left, so she was made into a demon. She at least got a legend. The washerwomen did not even get colour: their faces are black and white, as in an old photograph.
The painter
Mikołaj Sobczak (born 1989) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, studied at UdK Berlin and the Kunstakademie Münster and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He makes contemporary history painting peopled by figures of the LGBTQ+ movement and countercultural resistance, drawing on alternative historiographies. A Polityka Passport laureate, he is represented by Capitain Petzel in Berlin and Harkawik in New York.