ABOUT EXHIBITION

We would like to invite your to Natasha Mirak's painting exhibition

"Special case".

The opening of the painting exhibition: December 11, 2024, from 7:00-9:00 pm

The exhibition runs until February 1, 2025.


"In art more than in life, one should not trust the effect of the "first look".

In the case of the paintings of Kamila Szadaj (alias Natasha Mirak), this first look anchors our thoughts around the tendencies of the "new old masters," the Libellule Society, metaphorical painting or magic realism. They are all part of international networks that are slowly changing the perception of art after the postmodern collapse of the turn of the century. This is accompanied by a critical and aesthetic reflection on the foundations of contemporary painting. The names of David Kuszpit, Tomasz Kulka or, in our country, Prof. Bohdan Dziemidok, symbolize the arrival of a new view of the essence of our attitude to works of art, which in the shortest terms means that they can be interpreted through a synthesis of aesthetic and artistic values (the so-called. bivalent aesthetics), in which art falls prey to two phenomena that pretend to be art, while finding themselves outside of it - on the one hand it is kitsch, parasitizing on aesthetic values, and on the other hand post-conceptualism, parasitizing on artistic values. I recall this because Kamila Szadaj's graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw under Professor Anna Szewczyk in 2001, coincided with the beginning of the aforementioned wave, which has been growing for several years. Looking at the artistic activity and achievements of the first twenty years after graduating from college, it can be said that this difficult period, from the point of view of the artistic path, in a perverse way contributed to the way we can describe Natasha Mirak's painting today, because this is the pseudonym adopted by Kamila Szadaj, emphasizing, as it were, a new stage of creativity associated primarily with the "Provenience" series. A deeper analysis of the works from this series reveals to us a much more complicated, both in terms of form and content, world of Natasha Mirak's art than the phenomena mentioned at the beginning of the article."

Miroslaw Jasinski, Mysterious Case of Natasza M.,
Introduction to the exhibition, Warsaw 2024