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From 13 April, visitors to the City Gallery Wrocław will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in dreamy, phantasmagorical imagery meticulously transferred onto paper with oil pastels by the graphic artist Monika Szwed.
Words are always the starting point for the artist’s oneiric visions. In her works, Szwed freely follows sentences, quotations and text fragments taken out of context from her favourite literary works. As Jaromir Jedliński writes about her pieces: Next to readings, her works are saturated with memories, associations, fears and images. The world of childhood and the world of maturity are not definitively separated in her kaleidoscope.
The alternative worlds created by Szwed on paper are filled with an aura of hallucination or dream. Impersonal figures, animals, modernist buildings, furniture and levitating solids are detached from the context of time and space. And yet, the childlike lightness and apparent order of these compositions echo clear notes of melancholy or even cruelty. The light-hearted dreamy universe mixes here with the ruthless realities of life.
In his text to the catalogue, Aleksander Jasiński called Szwed’s works primers for dreams, as the artist uses repetitive motifs like calligraphic signs marked with complex symbolic content. By linking them together, she creates labyrinthine grids of meaning. Thus, although Szwed’s pieces can be read as separate, complete stories, the audience is welcome to follow their intuition and use them to try and construct a complex, multi-layered yet not necessarily realistic story. For through the exhibition title, the artist encourages us to give up rationalising what we see and trust in our own free associations.
The exhibition will be on display until 11 May.
The official opening of the exhibition takes place on 13 April at 6:00 PM.
Curators: Jaromir Jedliński, Mirosław Jasiński
