MARIOLA PRZYJEMSKA. CONSUMPTION, CONSTRUCTION AND MELANCHOLY
Saturday Art Walk
Zachęta – National Gallery of Art
admission with a ticket
The art of Mariola Przyjemska comments in a lively and engaged manner on the transformation of the real and symbolic Polish post-transformation landscape. In the early 1990s — almost a decade before sociologists and cultural researchers — the artist discovered the importance of branding and logos in the modern world. In the Labels series, she effectively expressed the importance of branding, in the works in the Cosmetics series, she combined the latest trends in consumerism, while the series of urban photographs and paintings are an ‘over-documentation’ of contemporary architectural transformations, a kind of psychogeography, a type of situationist drift.
Here, abstraction meets pop art, criticism meets advertising, and consumerism meets a radical defiance of conformity. After 2000, Przyjemska created an artistic commentary on consumer capitalism in her works, seeking an avant-garde free of didacticism and exaltation. These works are ironic, close to third-wave feminism, marked by affect, but characterised by a distanced view of both consumption and its critique. The artist invites us into a world of neoliberal bliss, and her art says more than classical critical art. In it, we recognise ourselves and ourselves alone, not only outside the commodity economy, but also at its centre.
guide: Sara Herczyńska