Mariola Przyjemska

Mariola Przyjemska (b. 23 August 1963 in Warsaw) works in painting and photography, and creates objects, installations and video. In 1983-1988 she studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, defending her diploma in the studio of Professor Tadeusz Dominik, with an annex under Professor Ryszard Winiarski. The early, „mystical” period of her painting was connected with the circle of the group Neue Bieriemiennost; she belongs to the group of artists of the 1990s who shaped the image of Polish art of the transformation period.

At the beginning of the 1990s, in response to the political changes, Przyjemska - almost a decade ahead of sociologists and culture researchers - discovered how great is the importance of the brand and the logo, and reached for the technique, new in Poland at the time, of large-format advertising photography. In the cycle „Tags” she photographed enlarged reverses of clothing tags or embedded the labels in Plexiglas as „specimens”, laying bare branding and commodity fetishism; in the cycle „Cosmetics” she set lipsticks and perfume bottles against the panorama of a transforming Warsaw, combining pop-art with lipstick feminism.

Her urban photographic and painterly cycles are an „over-documentation” of the transformations of the capital's architecture - a kind of psychogeography and situationist drift („Rondo ONZ”). In Przyjemska's work abstraction meets pop-art, and a critical but non-moralising commentary on consumer capitalism is permeated by a note of melancholy. A laureate of the Maria Anto and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Art Award (2021), she was given the extensive retrospective „Consumption, Construction and Melancholy” at the Zachęta in Warsaw (2022).