 Contrast settings |
 Link highlights |
 Font size |
 Spacing |
 Dyslexic friendly |
 Large cursor |
 Sitemap |
 Default settings |
On 23 July, the Wrocław City Gallery opens Matter and Identity, a remarkable encounter between two autonomous artistic stances united by a rich and wide-ranging drawing on the painterly tradition.
In her work, Natasza Mirak (Kamila Szadaj) draws on the legacy of the old masters, portraiture, the icon, the decorative language of Art Nouveau and magical realism, weaving all these influences and inspirations into an eclectic painterly structure. At the centre of her paintings stands the female figure in its theatricalised dimension – one built up from costume, prop and ornament. Although Mirak’s heroines are styled as ladies from bygone eras, the artist frequently places them within contemporary settings, juxtaposing them with fragments of today’s urban landscape, technological accessories and elements of mass culture. By building a bridge between present and past, the painter addresses the universal experience of femininity. More broadly, she asks what painting means today – in an age of triumphant technology, overproduced images and ceaseless quotation.
Daniel Krysta, for his part, draws openly on hyperrealism, matter painting and the still-life tradition, developing from these references a distinctive painterly language. Built on a process of reduction, his paintings detach technological objects from their utilitarian function and draw them into an almost metaphysical realm of silence. In doing so, the artist strips everyday life of its banal element, to capture it as a universal symbol of the man-made world. Underlying this painterly strategy is the question of whether spiritual experience remains possible in a world of machines.
The two artistic practices differ markedly in their power of impact. Krysta’s painting is grounded in silence, Mirak’s – in polyphony, yet both artists share an ambition to root painting in its historical sources and, in doing so, restore to it the seriousness of seeing.
In his catalogue text, Robert Gawłowski captures the differences and affinities between the two artists’ creative strategies with great precision:
Krysta seeks the boundary at which the image of an object loses its obviousness and begins to act through its mere presence, while Mirak the boundary beyond which representation loses its innocence and reveals its own theatricality. These two stances form a kind of diptych. On one side stands the thing – concentrated, technical, detached from function, given over to silence. On the other stands the mask – luminous, many-layered, historical, alive to the play of gazes. Krysta’s thing and Mirak’s mask speak different languages, but both defend the same thing: the picture’s right to mystery. And perhaps that is just why their painting, so different in register, meets in a single recognition: a picture is most alive when it does not explain the world to the very end but leaves within it a place where the thing begins to fall meaningfully silent, and the mask goes on looking longer than the face.
The opening of the exhibition will be accompanied by a concert (Agata Przyłucka – bassoon, Yurii Fedorkiv – bassoon; under the artistic supervision of Dr hab. Katarzyna Zdybel-Nam) and will take place on Thursday 23 July at 6:00 p.m.
The exhibition runs until 26 August 2026.
Curator: Mirosław Jasiński
