Studied in the Department of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, in ateliers
of the Professors: Szancenbach, Brzozowski and Buczek. She graduated in 1983.
She lives and works in Cracow, Poland.

The direction of the creative explorations of Barbara Palka winek is determined by a combination of the self painting pronunced form of its plane. Having dealt with the figurative painting for quite a long time, the painter left however a free margin for the interpretation of her works. It has been a kind of self-protection against the easy trivialisation of the painting form.
The art of Barbara Paka - Winek has many meanings. Her painting is a compromise between the illustrative art and the abstraction. The result of this compromise is the series of paintings, called ,,The Screens" by the author.
The present analysis is an attempt to find a broader philosophical context for ,,The Screens". The brightness of the painting matter, achieved by using the method of glazing is unexpectedly composed with the impenetrable planes of ,,likely figures".
The picture becomes a discourse between the visible - named and impenetrable - mysterious, but also very capacious. This, what seems to us to be impenetrable is most often beyond our awareness. The esteem for The Mystery has already disappeared in our culture. We do not even try to imagine the existence of the Reality beyond the dimension of usefulness. Our consumptive civilisation denies the ,,pure spirits", existing for their own beauty and light only. As useless is rejected everything, which belongs to the intimate, emotional sphere. There are the matters existing behind ,,the screen" usually, intimate, difficult to manifest, but still - real. They relate both to the divine and human affairs and have a common point, defined as a ,,Sacrum" sphere.
Therefore the invisible, but after all real - gave a complete explanation to all what was material and permanently variable, including the final physical deterioration. The screen made possible a reasonable intellectual interpretation of the visible world.
,,Screens" may also, as the author says ,,serve the spiritual liberation", by crossing behind the matter, into the glassy, transparent sphere. The latter is a transfer into another dimension, difficult to achieve by painting. The luminescence, emanescence of the picture is an important formal problem of the Artist's painting. It is strongly opposite to the coloured spot, materialised by the shapes of an object or a person.
The strong contrasts between red and black have a definite meaning value for the Artist. There is no abstraction. There is a play in the highest tones, engaging the man emotionally: the lovely silhouettes are accompanied by materialised emotions. They are moving more towards the light or towards the all - absorbing black. The red is however in the centre of the basic elements of her painting, meaning the same, but painfully divided reality of the Matter and the Spirit. The Artist likes the red. Her earlier pictures were also marked with red. When one is standing between the light and the darkness, the life and the death, when the darkness is called the light and the life is a screen of the death - it is difficult not to play in the highest tones. Therefore there is so much of the red, which as an active colour must engage also the watchers.
The Artist's painting begins with emotions. They create the form and the climate of the painting. It is the painting from the interior of the man, as the ,,extraction of a nerve". Therefore her ,,Screens" do not screen everything tightly and successfully. Sometimes the intimate sphere of the picture opens as the suddenly torn curtain, behind which something giving the understanding becomes visible.

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