© 2024 XY ANKA MIERZEJEWSKA

XY Anka Mierzejewska's Painting

When encountering the paintings by Anka Mierzejewska, we should not trust our first impression. This first impression is, of course, important, after all it provides a gateway through which we enter the space created by her pieces, but in general we will have to verify it, redefine our relationship with her works. These paintings entice, draw us into their space, encourage us to decipher the stories they contain, offer exciting journeys through various semantic and emotional territories, and at the same time, at some point, we begin to realise that it is actually ourselves who are being checked by these works, that the temptations are our temptations, that fears, obsessions and narratives are brought out of ourselves. The artist's work has fascinated and disturbed its audience for several decades – the unique character of her painterly language revealed itself early on and resulted, firstly, from her highly uncompromising, authentic, often belligerent attitude (both towards art and towards the world), and secondly, from the artist's specifically loving, greedy approach to painting. The symbiosis of these factors makes her paintings (series of paintings), in which various media – from photography and film to drawing and printmaking – are present and painterly processed (reinterpreted), have a distinctly individual, authorial character.

It is worth remarking that the painter rarely concentrates on a single painting. Both the subjects she undertakes and her favourite working method, which leads Mierzejewska to revolve around a certain motif, a set of colours or around a specific state of mind for an extended period of time, mean that she most often creates series of paintings. They often have a clear beginning, but no end, or the end results from the fact that the artist has already chased after the next temptation, the next obsession. In this situation, the natural question arises: does a piece of work is constituted by a series, or rather do individual paintings constitute separate pieces? There seems to be no clear-cut answer to this point – both solutions come into play and it is actually us, the recipients, who have to make the decision each time by ourselves.

This serial method of working causes the artist's works, her series of works, to have something essayistic about them – Mierzejewska does not begin her work when she already knows something, has understood something and wants to communicate to us one truth or another. Rather, in her case, we have a situation where she starts painting when something bothers her, when she discovers a certain problem that does not give her peace of mind. This is when she tries to formulate a series of painterly questions and a series of paintings show the process of grappling with them, revealing her emotional and intellectual wanderings amidst preocuppying issues. These visual, artistic essays demonstrate also her digressive working style. Essays generally have a digressive narrative character inherent in them, so it is not surprising that in the artist's work we see how from certain series, themes, questions and obsessions (if only concerning a colour, a body fragment or a linguistic phrase), further threads emerge. The catalysts triggering the next digression can be human gestures, certain slogans, disturbing colours or words. Photographic images or, more broadly, photo-media images, which play a key role in shaping the contemporary collective imagination, also play an extremely important role here. For the painter, they can be visual notes, collections of motifs and compositional schemes, and are therefore used by her instrumentally, but these photo-media images are also something more, treated as legitimate entities, for they become a way of looking at the world. The artist is aware that they codify today the mechanisms that govern people's view of reality, that they decree what is worthy of becoming a painting and how this painting should be composed.

Tables, beds, playgrounds – the search for a painterly language

Already the diploma, which the artist completed in 1998 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław in Konrad Jarodzki's studio,[A. Mierzejewska also studied in the lithography studio of Prof. Andrzej Basaj and Prof. Paweł Frąckiewicz] revealed her exceptional, rebellious and disobedient painting temperament. In the paintings presented, attention was drawn to the intense, non-obvious colour combinations – pinks, purples, reds and dirty yellows gave the works an expressive character. In general, one can recognise simple motifs in them, such as a table, armchair, chair, sofa or bench – the unreal colours, blurred forms, close to abstraction have something dreamlike about them. In addition, there are several variants of paintings here featuring a human figure, alone, in the centre of an empty room (as in an interrogation) or another in a puzzling space, where the isolation of the figure has something of the method used by F. Bacon (e.g. resulting in deformations, blurring and fading of the outline). Malarskie stoły [Painting Tables], exhibited just after the graduation, is an extremely interesting series of works whose underlying theme is identity games and questions. In these paintings, we sense a specific framing of photographic provenance – we see fragments of tables and soon realise that it is less about the tables and more about the human being, about interpersonal relations or the lack of them, about the table as a place of meeting, fight or gamble.' Here, the table becomes a kind of territory where identity is fought over, socio-cultural hierarchies are established, divisions between the kins and the strangers, between those important and those less so, are codified.

The Passion erotic series (1999) is a story about the first phase of infatuation, about desire and the need for tactile intimacy. The artist chooses generally small, intimate painting formats with tightly framed fragments of bodies, close-ups, flirtatious gestures (wine, cigarette), kisses. The colour atmosphere of these paintings is carnal and warm (sometimes hot), dominated by pinks, reds, oranges, although there are also some greys and blues, we see vigorous brushstrokes, expressive yet synthetic body forms. In this painterly tale of infatuation, eroticism and intimacy, the world is absent or almost absent, the fragments of reality are at most an insignificant, though recognisable, setting. The lovers in this state are, after all, outside the world, outside everyday life – they see only themselves, they are a separate, self-sufficient cosmos to themselves.

Another aspect of corporeality appeared in the Simplicity series (2000), in which Mierzejewska shows people in simple, life-like situations. The women are putting something on Sukienka w kropy [Dot Dress]) or stripping something off (dress, panties), while the man is nearby, preoccupied with his own affairs. The silhouettes of the figures are built up with strong colour contours, the bodies are not in contact, the colour often seems to live a life of its own, putting the bodies in colourful quotation marks (Akt żółty na różowym [Nude Yellow on Pink], The title bed, present in these paintings, is a particular kind of stage or arena, a territory of tension and alienation, where distance and separation, conflicts and tensions are most severely revealed. A tale of everyday life that slowly but inevitably begins to verify the earlier infatuation – distance and emotional distance emerge. These themes are continued in the paintings from the Bed series (2001), in which the artist tells directly about painful 'awakening' from erotic fascinations. The title bed, present in these paintings, is a particular kind of stage or arena, a territory of tension and alienation, where distance and separation, conflicts and tensions are most severely revealed. The narrative is largely produced by the colour atmosphere of the paintings and the way in which the bodies are painted, one of which is able to be more transparent than the other – a painterly depiction of relationships in crisis, growing alienation, increasing problems of communication. It seems that the paintings from 1998 – 2001 are a kind of autobiographical narrative, although the artist universalises the story, avoids speaking directly, does not employ an unambiguous title or a clear anecdote. She is more concerned with finding a painterly language through which she can relate universal human experiences.

Relationships with the closest ones are also the subject of the series Black Children series of paintings (2002) - in black and white works, the artist speaks about a zero-sum system of relationships with little children. The autobiographical starting point of the narrative is evoked in the titles of some of the works (Jaś, Jaś i mleko [Johnny, Johnny and Milk]) - generally white-painted silhouettes emerge from the black background. Mierzejewska seems to be practising a kind of painterly calligraphy here, painting the children's images with soft movements of a broad brush, capturing seemingly very simple, ordinary situations and gestures. And yet there is something unsettling in these paintings, an atmosphere of tension or anxiety. Several of the works accompanying this series (including those with elaborate colouring) feature laughing or screaming childlike figures, menacing, traumatised, perhaps frightened.

In the Playground series of paintings from 2004, the protagonists are again children, this time slightly older, for whom the playground of the title becomes an extremely important stage on which they play out their daily games for identity. In these paintings, one can clearly sense the photographic departure point for the painterly compositions, and it is not only about the extremely faithful rendering of the figures, but also about the composition of the works, about the way they are framed. Here we have no doubt that it is a photographic camera that has decided the grammar and ethics of vision. The children, usually little girls, function in disconcerting empty spaces, they do not play together, but side by side, they are separate. The images of The Playground are striking in their intense, unsettling colours, which make what would be merely a painterly translation of commemorative photographs, ordinary visual notes, here begin to exude a mysterious tension. It seems that somewhere not far away lurks a hard-to-define threat, that in a moment some misfortune will happen, some catastrophe will come. The little girls we see are beings on the threshold or in transition – soon, in a month, in a year or two, they will cease to be little girls, they will play different games, they will choose to play different games.

In a series of portraits from 2005 (One Week in London), the artist asks a series of identity questions, the images seem entangled in the colours seeping onto them. These images function a little like traces – of someone's face, of a face, of a social game. These images function a little like traces – left after someone's face, a facial expression, a social game. They are crumpled, tired and anguished. The paintings here are often of a palimpsest nature, with the artist superimposing another layers on top of the first one, painting the contours of hands, faces, portrait fragments. The images of people are transformed into masks – in one painting, the mask of the artist's brother's face floats against a grey background, and we look at an image detached from its context and body, which has lost its connection with its owner. One might get the impression that it is one of those media face-masks that are only the surface.

Humour as a weapon

In the years that followed, Mierzejewska produced a number of works in which she undertook a specific painterly battle against various aspects of contemporary culture unbearable to her. Her works become the fields of numerous battles – it is a fight against the art market, against the stereotypical expectations of the audience who are looking for a beautiful painting for their living rooms, a fight against the aesthetic-stylistic fashions of the spectacle culture, against the so-called prettiness, against the mimetic duties of painting. Her opponents are therefore not flesh-and-blood people, but are rather the cultural mechanisms, schemes and value systems in force in the culture of the spectacle, of which – it is an unavoidable paradox – such critical, artistic activities form also a part. Perhaps that is why there is something of the battle with the shadow here, the fight is real, the emotions real, but it is a fight in which the stakes are not victory, it cannot be won, one can only collapse from exhaustion. The artist is aware of the various traps that lie in wait for her during such a struggle. One of the most dangerous may be over-seriousness or a sense of mission. Humour and laughter are the best defences against such dangers – Mierzejewska often uses the weapon of laughter, which in her productions is a form of opposition against institutional or cultural dictates that give validity to arbitrary solutions and values. Sometimes laughter becomes a small revolution, a reversal of the hierarchy of values, sometimes it comes from a feeling of helplessness and has a slightly neurotic character, close to black humour. Various forms of humour, irony and self-irony can be found in many of the artist's works, mockery and laughter are also present in a number of artistic actions of the STARY BANAN [Old Banana] group, which Anka Mierzejewska and Małgorzata ET BER Warlikowska founded in 2006. Their self-ironic actions, in which Dadaist traditions resound, are usually built around an expressive, witty title-slogan: e.g. 'OLD BANANA quits paintbrushes' (2008), 'Pumping the art market' (2008), 'Putting reality through your head' or 'OLD BANANA gives for free' (both 2010). In them, the artists played with various absurdities of the present day and humorously commented on the situation of artists clashing with the mechanisms of the art market.

The exhibition Pomidor [Tomato], presented in 2006 at Wrocław's BWA Awangarda gallery, commented with humour and irony on the expectations of both cultural institutions and art audiences that artists should address identifiable and nameable issues in their works, that they should fit in with art-historical tendencies. The title of the exhibition alludes to a children's game in which there is one answer to all the questions, that answer here is a series of paintings with standardised formats, where specific painterly 'drawings' of twigs with tomato fruit appear on various coloured backgrounds. The artist offers the option of configuring the elements in any colour, ostensibly to meet the expectations of potential customers who would like to acquire a 'safe' pictorial motif for their living room and not be forced to change the upholstery of their sofas and armchairs. A similar game can be found in the series Chcecie kwiaty, macie kwiaty [You Want Flowers, You Have Flowers] (2007), where ostentatiously large, single flowers filling the rectangles of the canvases are a joke on the typical expectations of the public. Whereas in the Znikające obrazy [Disappearing Paintings] series (2007), the works have a rather short 'shelf life', as they were painted with biodegradable paint, which means that – soon after painting – the works begin to fade and disappear. The artist reminds us that everything, including paintings, is subject to transience and that we can only to a certain extent influence the its pace.

An ironic commentary on the mechanisms of the art market is the Surname series, where the same, very simple motif, namely the artist's name, appears on paintings of varying formats. The series was created on 1 April 2007 in front of the 'Gosia' shop in Ligota Piękna and was helped by random people from this village near Wrocław, who painted the name MIERZEJEWSKA on individual paintings. The artist concluded that ultimately, the most important criterion for the art market's valuation of a painting is not the pictorial motif or the artistry, but the artist's name. A collector buys a 'Cézanne', a 'Picasso' or a 'Kossak', so it is possible to simplify matters and offer paintings with the name alone. Another aspect of how the art market works is the practices employed by various galleries and institutions that limit and often even exclude access for artists outside their 'stables'. The series of works entitled Nie, bo nie (No,'Cause No) presents a series of paintings commenting on such practices – we will find here paintings with texts inscribed into the canvases, which are ironic comments on the situation of the artist, the politics of galleries and the increasingly primitive mechanisms of the culture of spectacle, in which Copernicus's Gresham's law, according to which bad money drives good money out of the market, is becoming more and more visible. The laughter that echoes these painterly comments has something dark about it, giving a distance, although at the same time signalling helplessness: We Are Not Looking For a New Artist, Sztuka to suka [Art is a Bitch], Obrazy w sepii i błękicie sprzedają się znakomicie [Paintings in Sepia and Blue Sell Brilliantly], Either Pretty or Painting, Thinking is Hard Work.

Many of Mierzejewska's works show various forms of struggle with language – certainly this attitude of fight manifests itself in this way too. Our problems, even when we are not yet aware that they are problems, first manifest themselves in language. This is where certain phrases, new (or pulled from the linguistic dustbin and dusted off) linguistic schemes, shifts in meaning, simplifications or linguistic tricks appear, which pretend to be universal tools for describing reality and interpersonal communication. The artist is sensitive to such phenomena, especially when they concern art, when they are an attempt to formulate expectations of artworks and of artists' tasks and responsibilities. At times it seems that the painter listens to these generally clumsy and stereotypical expectations and – like a mischievous deity – literally fulfils these 'prayers' or requests: You want flowers, you have flowers, you want dogs, there you go! There is a further aspect to this – in her works, the artist comments with humour on the mimetic expectations of images, her works also often have nothing to do with the established tradition of art history of pictorial motifs. The image here is something else, it can be, for example, a surname, a logotype, a sign, a verbal phrase, a trace, it is an emotion transformed into a colour surrounded by a strong contour. It is therefore about paintings that are not meant to provide viewers with simple visual pleasure or aesthetic satisfaction, one sometimes gets the impression that pleasure (including aesthetic pleasure) seems suspicious to the painter, it is inappropriate, a trap and makes one lose vigilance. In addition, the feeling of satisfaction and experiencing pleasure makes us lazy and is addictive.

Fears, diagnoses, therapies

2008 saw the creation of the Street series, in which the artist returns to the painterly solutions she used in the 1990s. These are paintings – snapshots – in which the streets of the title are not scenery, but acquire a strange organicness and are transformed into hallucinatory, dreamlike visions with distorted visibility, with disturbed perception of space and colours. Lonely human figures roam the city, which sometimes happens to be a woman (sometimes a man), immersed in its streets as if in a dream from which they cannot awake. Lonely in our dreams, we also become increasingly lonely and alienated during our waking lives. In the Brainwashing exhibition presented in London at the Unit 24 gallery in 2010, the artist constructs in her paintings a story about the perception of works from the field of so-called new media, where viewers with headphones on their heads, staring at screens and monitors, cut themselves off from reality, including other beings. The situation related to the perception of art is only the starting point here; in fact, the series of paintings featuring heads, sometimes only skulls, with headphones, is a story about human actions in various places and circumstances. Devices that were intended to communicate, to connect with other people (e.g. smartphones), very effectively cut people off from the world, alienating them, drawing them into a media reality full of temptations. The story of digital images encroaching between people and reality continues with the 2011 Drugie De eN A [The Second De eN A] series – Mierzejewska inscribes (immerses) female and male body silhouettes, seen from below, into near-abstract images with vibrating, layered colour structures, reminiscent of specific pixels from digital images. The figures seem to be floating in this colourful, rippling matter.

An extremely interesting, multi-faceted exhibition was presented by the artist in 2014 at Wrocław's City Gallery – the whole thing was entitled Direct Painting and was a painterly reaction to various forms of violence and oppression present in the contemporary world (including Russia's aggression on the eastern territories of Ukraine). The tapes or broad coloured lines painted in the paintings warn of danger, they are protective barriers to protect vulnerable beings from violence. We are used to such tapes around, for example, parcels (Caution!!! Do not throw!!! Caution glass) or surrounding potholes and bumps in the road. The oppressiveness of the world, the many dangers lurking around people, have always created a desire to take refuge and to lock ourselves away in safe places. This is why we build walls, put up fences on borders. For this very reason, medieval depictions of the Garden of Eden have something claustrophobic about them – they are a cramped enclave surrounded by defensive walls. Only in such a space could one then feel truly safe.

The individual rooms in the City Gallery were signed by the artist with paintings bearing the names of world metropolises that are important centres of contemporary art and culture: New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo. Of course, it is not the case that the works in the individual gallery rooms had any connection to these capitals of world art, but rather a humorous infusion of this worldliness into the exhibition space (the series is entitled Artworld).

Mierzejewska's exhibition activities associated with the City Gallery in Wrocław resulted in the following year's (2015) Kolejka po sztukę [Queue for Art] installation. Full-size human figures painted contoured on cardboard boxes were lined up on the pavement in front of the gallery in the form of a long queue. People seem to be waiting for the gallery to open, waiting for the art, which through this work, full of distanced humour, turns out to be as necessary as bread or other basic products. It becomes something as worthy of desire as branded clothes offered during Black Friday promotions. Here, the artist seems to be asking the people around how it is possible for them to live without art, how contact with art is not one of their most basic needs.

In the 2nd decade of the 21st century, there are many themes in the painter's work that she describes as therapeutic, with this therapy being both about reality and the people living in it, and also having a very personal, intimate character. The extensive To Bee or not to Bee (2016) series of paintings certainly has such a therapeutic dimension – the protagonists here are bees, industrious, intelligent insects living in large communities. It is a painterly fairy tale, a story about a world beyond good and evil, about a life that needs no excuses or justifications. In the author's text accompanying this series, we find praise for simple life, simple sensations; there is an acceptance of pain, heat, ants, an annoying pebble in the shoe. It reads, among other things: "Life is simple. The burdensome. The heat. The water is icy. The dust sticks and dirties your clothes. Mosquitoes buzz that you can't sleep. The bites hurt. The pain is real."

The problem of therapies that we try to apply to ourselves or that we recommend to the world and the various ills present in our reality is the subject of a series of paintings presented at the turn of 2017/18 at the National Forum of Music in Wrocław. Mierzejewska paints on canvases sewn together out of narrow strips of fabric and builds a story about the fashion for therapies and about the feverish search by many people for the meaning of life and the recipe for happiness. In these paintings, we find motifs and themes that have appeared in her earlier works: the table, relationships with people and places (difficult and not obvious), dogs (or rather, the outlines of dogs), simple sensations, states and distinctions (heat – cold, love – fear, good – evil). It is worth quoting here an excerpt from the artist's statement in which she talks about her motivations: "The search for happiness, broadly defined, is reflected in the painting method of the latest series: I am just ready to be me (quoting Lauren Hill) When I nail a canvas or other coloured material onto the stretcher bars, too much is left behind. Only then do I trim the sides – when the painting is finished. I've been collecting all these offcuts – coloured and linen strips for years. I have entire bags of them. I know that one day I will paint this new series on them. That day is today. Therefore, the coloured strips of material, the fallout from all the previous paintings, are a visual sign of recycling, not only the very material of which the paintings are composed, but also of being in a constant cycle of renewing myself. This series is a visual sign of the struggle of someone who is searching, who wants to grow, to be better. This series speaks of years of wandering, scanning reality for support, for answers to the question: how to live satisfactorily. (...) This series shows the search for a 'miracle diet' for the soul."

The search for magical power in paintings or, more broadly, in all human creative endeavours, seems to be an important theme present in many of A. Mierzejewska's works. In the project Świat się zmienia od nic nierobienia [The World Changes From Doing Nothing] (2018), the artist talks about rejecting bad emotions and evoking good ones, about positive and warm relationships, about imagination, carelessness, the desire to be in a group, to hug and be cuddled. In short, the basic question is still here: how to be happy? It's not easy, because the context for this question is ultimately our modern age, marked by an omnipresent rush and over-stimulation. The context is the reality that we have an abundance of urgent, pressing tasks to complete. Doing nothing has a bad connotation; after all, a decent, responsible person should be a busy person, with a number of tasks to perform. Such a task is both work and rest, such a task is family dinner and gardening, and going out for a walk must be walking the dog or at least completing a planned number of ten thousand steps. The artist hopes that when we stop in our rush, if only for a moment, when we get out of the compulsion to keep going, we will realise that for the world rushing past us, it is only now that we become truly important, that it notices us only when we stop. Perhaps the issue is that we will then become one of the key reference points for a slipping reality, that we will be the dam that resists the flood of sensations, injunctions, sensationally trivial news, that counters the overabundance of media news from which stories of human stupidity, cruelty and greed continually ooze. There is a magical dimension in the works of the Ciało myśli ["The Body of Thought"] series (2020), in which words (thoughts), which should define our lives and our world, become images. Using a calligraphic painting method (broad brush), the artist writes down simple words – slogans: love, joy, truth, goodness, peace, heart, sun, while each of them is painted twice, has a kind of echo, becomes a rhythmic painting melodeclamation. It is therapy by means of art, which the artist applies to a bad reality. Mierzejewska intuitively senses that the world is as we tell it to ourselves, so we need to tell our world anew, redefine it in our narratives. This is not an easy undertaking, because in the culture of the spectacle, dramatic news and apocalyptic stories about disasters, violence and catastrophes sell much better, have better viewership and click-through rates.

The 2019 Marina Wellcome series is an artistic dialogue with Marina Abramovic's work, her attitude towards the world, life and art. A. Mierzejewska, in an emotional, very empathetic text, talks about her attitude towards the outstanding performer – in Abramowic she finds a soulmate, she finds a person who seems similarly devoted to art as herself, who wants to make the world a better place through her works. Colour is central to the paintings in this series – everything or almost everything is played out in red. It is the colour most associated with corporeality, the colour of blood, of life, the colour of the wounded body. In Mierzejewska's paintings, even the lips, even the lips of the vagina marked with this red, become wounds.

These particular artistic endeavours, which have a therapeutic context in themselves, concerned with reality, are a reaction to various oppressive phenomena in contemporary culture, but also contain more individualised, personal themes. They are an attempt to apply to oneself and one's immediate environment a story that will be an antidote to the mental and physical toxins attacking us from all sides. The paintings, entitled Vaccinated with art, presented at the Wrocław City Museum in 2021, represent this kind of narrative. They feature panthers, cheetahs, lynxes, lions – big, predatory cats full of primal strength flit about in these spacious, often almost monochrome painterly compositions, played out in turquoises, blues, yellows and pinks. The bodies of the animals often have clear, purple outlines, so this specific painterly calligraphy, characteristic of the artist, also appears here. The series was created in the context of the various restrictions on our everyday freedom associated with the corona virus pandemic, so it's no surprise that it has an escapist mood written all over it. It's an escape from confinement, from disheartening, depressing news. It is a childish disagreement with an oppressive, pessimistic reality and an immersion into a world of primordial animal freedom and liberty, an escape into a utopian vision of reality in which nature can cope because it is ruled by instinct and the will of life.

The body – records of temptation and fascination

A body in motion, performing various acrobatics and tricks related to sport, dance, eroticism and sex, or simply enjoying its vitality in a youthful way, is an important theme present in A. Mierzejewska's work. As early as 2002, she painted a series of black-and-white paintings entitled Sport, where we recognise snapshot-like notes (with photographic sources) from various disciplines: pole vaulting, hurdles running, sprints, high jump, rowing or florets. Here, bodies are transformed into synthetic painterly signs, records of kinetics, where complex activities seem to transform human anatomy. This series foreshadows the artist's later works, in which her fascination with movement would take on a variety of forms. These threads can be found in the 2008 Nie dotykać [Do Not Touch] series, in which the artist silhouetted a number of female bodies during gymnastic acrobatics, while painting on velvet to trigger haptic temptations in the viewer. In recent years, images of the body have been recurring in many of the artist's works – generally featuring bodies that are young, fit, exuding strength and vitality. In 2022, she created the Antidote series of works, in which the paintings give the impression of visual painterly notes of dance improvisation in contact, a method characteristic of many contemporary movement-dance experiments. In the paintings, played out in a narrow range of colours (pinks and navy blues on blue or yellow backgrounds), the bodies seem to lose their anatomical stability and turn into almost abstract forms transformed by touch (erotica), dance and exercise. The titles of the individual paintings in this series evoke Mediterranean atmospheres and places (e.g. Sicily, Syracuse), full of light and warmth.Similar themes, though of a decidedly more intensely erotic nature, also appear in the 3 Colours series of paintings of 2023, in which all the works are played out in yellows, pinks and violets. These paintings feature overlapping, intermingling and interpenetrating bodies (fragments of bodies) that have actually lost their identity. The viewer is drawn into the space of the paintings and experiences the energy of the forms, close to abstraction and yet still corporeal, the viewer absorbs the energy of the colours, which also seem to enter into an erotic relationship with each other. Mierzejewska constantly establishes very intimate, emotional relationships with colours – she is aware of this, it is an important aspect of her painterly, artistic identity. In her blog she writes: "These three colours, they are dangerous liaisons, yellow pushes itself around, it's confident, it's self-centred, it's insufferable! It thinks that because it shines the brightest, any other must get out of its way, it clash with the pink, the pink knows itself to be magically nostalgic and soft, carnal, sensual, youthful and slightly depressive, its coolness wants to balance the warmth of the yellow, but will it succeed? Violet is the negotiator and it posses the whistle here – he sets up their relationship with a thin, sure line.‘

In her painterly stories about the body, Mierzejewska often uses the language of painterly calligraphy, which can be found in many of her works – she builds up forms with soft, free strokes of broad brushes, with the movements of the brush, which leaves a colourful mark on the canvas (or other support), having a clear beginning and end. This method is particularly evident in the painterly works on paper, such as in the 2018 Octopus blue series, where the body becomes a mysterious, almost abstract painterly mark painted in navy blue on a blue background that only partially covers the territory of the cardboard. In the exquisite Octopus Men triptych (2022), painted on dark paper, the artist creates a synthetic image of a man's back with two or three brushstrokes. Painterly calligraphies ‘written’ in white acrylic paint on black paper can also be found in the excellent 2023 series. Z Man, Z Star and Zorba, in which the human silhouette is reduced to a sign. The works in the Zorba series seem to provide ready-made visual material for a multimedia animation, evoking the famous cinematic dance motif.

A figure who appeared in 2023 in several series of Mierzejewska's drawing works is the legendary dancer Josephina Baker. One of these series was created on unshaped recycled cardboard, the individual drawings show how the anatomy of the naked body is transformed under the influence of ecstatic dance, how losing oneself in movement and its space-time redefines corporeality. Fragments of blue background frame and painterly rhythm the individual poses – the artist often places several (even five) silhouettes of the dancer on a single sheet of paper. Baker is also the protagonist of a series of drawings, consisting of fifty works, in which we find a brilliantly executed visual equivalent of her dance. Drawn in charcoal, the paintings are characterised by a soft, confident line; the artist captures the essence of movement, swirling, dynamic, defining space with movement and marking it with a bodily rhythm. Both Scopas' Dancing Bacchantess of Skopas, the dancing dervishes, the ritual dances so essential to many primitive cultures, and the source and timeless childlike joy of a body that enjoys movement, which in dancing manifests an excess of vitality, are present in these drawn forms.

The Octopus painting appears also as a drawing (2018) - here the female body takes on forms close to abstraction, although it is an abstraction endowed with a clearly organic quality. The movement of the body, a dance perhaps, seems to take place in a special aquatic environment. The soft, charcoal-drawn shapes are those of both the woman and the seaweed (fucus), so we observe here a symbiotic relationship between the woman's body and the aquatic vegetation – this is a woman-fucus undergoing transformation. We find a series of internal rhythms in this series of fascinating metamorphoses, which should come as no surprise, since water is, after all, the natural habitat of the god of transformation, Proteus. The images are arranged in sequences for which both musical and cinematic references can be found. In many of A. Mierzejewska's paintings, the body is subjected to a particular fragmentation, which, on the one hand, results from the way the body is framed in the photographic notes used by the artist, while, on the other hand, it is a trace of the fetishization of selected fragments of the human body in various narratives present in contemporary culture (from cosmetic, erotic, through sports, to medical). In the Body Language series (2023), body fragments become signs of a mysterious, unknown pictorial language or alphabet, in which shapes, contours and colours are equally important, and seem to enjoy considerable independence here, autonomizing and wandering over backgrounds and body fragments. Whereas in the Super Man series, the artist shows male bodies indulging in various exercises (body building), struggling with each other (fighting or sex) and actually transforming themselves entirely into muscles swollen with exertion. The mood of struggle is further enhanced by the stylistic and colouristic atmosphere of these paintings – uniformly coloured backgrounds show dark contours of bodies, filled in with intense colours: dark red, pink, yellow, poison green with violet, Prussian blue. A drawing version of similar motifs is presented in the Man series, in which successive works look like notes from a bodybuilding show with a display of back musculature. Here, it is not the dynamics that matter, in these ascetic forms drawn with a soft, confident line, it is the statics, the pose of the body that is important to demonstrate the strength, the tension that is the climax.

In the artist's latest series of paintings (Life, 2023 – 2024), fragments of the body reappear, and attention is drawn to specific 'close-ups' of hands, legs or feet captured during exercise or other more enigmatic activities. The paintings are in warm tones and again feature the artist's favourite colour scheme, with the contours of the body being blue, the bodies themselves yellow, while the backgrounds are red and orange.

Mierzejewska's fascination with the body has something deeply disturbing in itself, like all fascination, some mysterious, dark realm. It is a very primordial, source dimension inherent in the Latin term fascinatio. Pascal Quignard writes: "Fascination mows down the speech like the Grim Reaper mows down the life. Fascination is the blind spot of language. Fascinated gazes are always cast from behind." In Mierzejewska's paintings, it is not only about the etymological and cultural contexts hidden in the word fascination and explored so interestingly by Quignard, but also about the fact that human beauty, beauty and gracefulness seem to be something dangerous and unobvious in them, they arouse distrust, make us stay vigilant and are sometimes threatening. The artist seems to be saying that beauty is a costume or a mask that needs to be removed in order to see what is hidden underneath, what is the essence of a person's bodily identity. It is completely different in the case of the animals (e.g. big predatory cats) that appear in the artist's paintings – their beauty can be menacing, the grace of their movements mesmerising, but there is nothing inappropriate or suspicious about it.

Anka Mierzejewska's painterly narratives do not have a linear structure; there are no classical solutions here in which a story must have a beginning, a development, some kind of climax and an ending. Rather, her series have a circular shape, a visual rondeau in which a motif and a colour or set of colours are played out. The viewer must abandon the safe perspective of the distanced observer ( an expert, a connoisseur or even an art lover) and become a participant, must respond to the challenge formulated by the works and, surrounded by the paintings, as it were, from inside them, must begin to ask questions, must start a conversation.

P. Quignard, Seks i trwoga, przekł. Krzysztof Rutkowski, Warszawa 2002, p. 6