2019 "Marina Welcome", art studio, Wrocław
Acrylic on canvas, series, 2019
Formats: 190 × 140 cm, 190 × 120 cm, 190 × 100 cm
Some canvases cut in the middle; some cut and sewn together again
text 2026
In 2019, when Marina Abramović arrived in Poland for her major retrospective at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, Anka Mierzejewska painted Marina Welcome as a tribute. It is a greeting between two artists whose paths ran in parallel, each reaching similar places independently, and each at her own cost.
The chronology matters. Around 2000, Mierzejewska was working in Poland with no internet and little access to news from the West. Her series of screaming, exposed female bodies, often pregnant, at the moment a woman most needs protection, culminated in the exhibition Two Women Make Twice as Much Noise as One at Mleczarnia in Kraków, made without any knowledge of Abramović, whom she came to know only much later. The paintings came from her own life: an extreme and painful commitment to becoming an artist, and the sacrifice that this demanded. Relationships, home and any form of emotional comfort were given up so that the work could exist.
That two artists, formed within socialist systems and without contact, should arrive at such similar territory says something about the conditions that shaped them. Both grew up amid greyness, patriarchy and the daily weight borne by women, and both answered with a total surrender of life to art.
The red liquid paint in Marina Welcome was chosen to suggest blood. It acknowledges the edge Abramović reached with her own body, and the edge Mierzejewska reached in her life. The canvases carry that language physically: some are cut through the middle, others cut and sewn back together, so that rupture and repair are written into the structure of the paintings.
The tribute also marks a shared turn. By then Abramović had moved from confrontation toward stillness, developing practices such as counting grains of rice as a form of care. In 2018, Mierzejewska had begun her own move toward calm with the octopus series, made on rough grey paper and one-metre round cardboards, where soft, flowing forms settle the viewer. She has since carried this direction through several series of swimmers: women and men dissolving into water and becoming waves, in calming blues and greens. This quiet came from no outside pressure. It grew out of motherhood, and out of a decision to stop shouting, to listen, and to simply be.
Looking back from 2026, the parallel is clear. Marina Welcome holds the language of rupture and repair: blood-red paint, the cut and the seam, the shout that is already turning toward silence. It is a tribute to a kindred artist, and an invitation to the viewer to follow both journeys from confrontation to calm.
© 2026 ANKA MIERZEJEWSKA XY