2007 "DO NOT TOUCH"

This series examines the unspoken contract of accommodation that women are asked to sign: to adapt, to concede, and to reshape the self until it fits the space society has allotted. The female figure is repeatedly bent, folded and reconfigured, a visual record of the cost of that compliance.

She is also expected to be alluring and charming on demand. The paintings hold this expectation in tension with its counterpart: a woman who is asked to be provocative while living with vigilance and fear. Allure and anxiety are not presented as opposites but as simultaneous conditions of the same body.

The work's argument is made through material contradiction. The body is rendered in velvet, soft, tactile and vulnerable, and set against environments of heavily worked, abrasive acrylic: gritty, resistant, and hostile to the eye and the hand. Softness is placed in perpetual friction with a world that does not accommodate it.

That world is also reduced to a strict binary of colour. Each painting is limited to two colours (in two works, three), an unapologetic palette of this or that, with no gradation and no soft edge. The compositional logic mirrors the social one: women are judged harshly, by men, by other women, and by society at large.

The artist makes this work as an advocate for women, from an openly feminist perspective. Its message is simple: let women live.

© 2026 ANKA MIERZEJEWSKA XY