Roman Ondak Maja in Blue, 2025

A biographical work, Maja in Blue, 2025, is based on a photo taken in 1998 of the artist’s wife. It depicts a woman in a bathtub, the scene bathed in luminous blue. Her head appears large—the bathtub was very small—and disembodied, the body hidden below the surface of the water. Tightly cropped, the blue environment around her keeps her contained, perhaps even imprisoned as the dark grid of the tiles suggests. The intensity of her upward-turned gaze transports us into the past, or, it is her gaze that travels to our present.

The work’ poignancy draws attention to the idea that individual sights, experiences, and decisions are what shape a life, that past and present are in a constant dialogue across time. Ondak's vision of everyday life as moments from which history is made is a humanist one.