Anka Mierzejewska XY - contemporary artist, painter

Anka Mierzejewska (XY)

Lives and works in Wrocław.

Anka Mierzejewska is a painter who joins two approaches usually kept apart: conceptual thinking and a forceful painting practice. Each work begins as an idea and is carried out in paint with equal rigor. She works in series, and each series ends when its concept feels fulfilled, at which point the next emerges. She follows her curiosity down new paths, accepts being ridiculous, and allows herself total transformations, changing medium, scale, format and subject until the result surprises even her. She calls this Identity Recycling: the continual dismantling and renewal of the self and of the painting, in which the materials, gestures and assumptions of one series are broken down and reused in the next. What remains constant is the force of the gesture, immediate and expressive.

She signs her work XY, the male sex chromosomes. The signature is a concept put into practice: an ironic comment on a history in which only men were taken seriously in art. Feminism is the central line in her work. The woman in her paintings is neither symbol nor ornament; she is subject, energy and force. The line runs through Two Women Make Twice as Much Noise as One (2002); DO NOT TOUCH (2007), a series of gymnasts on velvet in which the female body appeared as a fragile space surrounded by danger; and Antidote (2022), which turns to liberation from restriction of every kind. The work comes from dissent: from resistance to prescribed social roles, political systems and forms of language that seek to contain female experience.

Three further concerns run alongside it. The first is autonomy, which she regards as the first and foremost human need: NO BECAUSE I SAID SO (2009), SKATE (2018), Someone Here Is a Dancer (2022). The second is the body as a source of thought: BODY OF THOUGHT (2019), SUPERMAN (2022), Body Language (2023). The third is freedom as a state reached through contact with oneself and the world: Dancing in the Maze (2023), SiLENCE (2024), PiECE of PEACE (2025). In a parallel line of work, she examines the art world she belongs to, in MAKE A NAME (2007), Brainwashing (2010), Art Like No Other (2010) and The Queue for Art (2015).

The transformations are visible in the work itself. Her most recent series, PiECE of PEACE and SiLENCE, are painted almost entirely in blues, greens and emeralds, and fill the exhibition space with a luminous, underwater atmosphere, somewhere between the bottom of a swimming pool and the Mediterranean between Sicily and Sardinia. An earlier body of work was the opposite: black, graphic and austere, with small, wildly dancing figures in white on paper. In color or in its absence, the work holds intensity together with tenderness and irony.

Mierzejewska names the German Expressionists, among them Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Franz Marc, as a lasting affinity, along with Georg Baselitz among later artists. Her current research draws on more than three decades of painting and performance and is conducted in dialogue with neuroscience, movement science, psychology and performance studies. It asks whether physical freedom in artistic movement can be understood as a form of knowledge, and how art can become a place where freedom is physically experienced, not only represented.

She studied at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, trained in lithography under Professor Andrzej Basaj, and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław in the studio of Professor Konrad Jarodzki. With Małgorzata ET BER Warlikowska, she co-founded the artist-run feminist collective STARY BANAN, which questions the role of the artist and the place of art in contemporary society.

She has presented nearly thirty solo exhibitions and taken part in many group shows in Poland and abroad. Solo presentations include Alien DNA, City Museum of Wrocław (2011-12); Brainwashing, Unit24 Gallery, London (2010); What's up?, Galerie Pokusa, Wiesbaden (2012); BODY OF THOUGHT, EklektikArt Foundation, Wrocław (2020); Vaccinated with Art, City Museum of Wrocław (2021); and STOP! Anatomy of Relations, Museum of the University of Wrocław (2025). Group exhibitions include Polish Painting in the XXI Century, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2006); Made in Poland, shown in Berlin, Nuremberg and at the Palais des Nations in Geneva (2011); Handle With Care, Ostrale, Dresden (2015); the Affordable Art Fair, Amsterdam (2016); Open Collection, Four Domes Pavilion of the National Museum in Wrocław (2024); and, in New York, Mothership, Brooklyn (2022) and Van Der Plas Gallery (2023, 2025). Her work has also been shown in Paris (2009), Berlin (2020) and Wiesbaden (2009, 2012, 2026), and discussed in Artluk, Format, Contemporary Lynx, Sztuka.pl and ODRA.

Her work is held in the collections of Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, the National Museum in Wrocław, the Museum of the City of Wrocław and the Krupa Art Foundation. She has received scholarships from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland (2007, 2008), the Lower Silesian Voivodeship (2013) and the 160/160 program of Zachęta and the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts.

Mierzejewska works with Gallery M in Wrocław, where she has exhibited since 2010.