Lushness: 21st-Century Polish Women Seen against a Background of Moldovan Tradition

bujnosc_wernisaz_2_z_27.jpg, default, Exhibition view of ‘Lushness: Women’s Art in the 21st Century’ at the National Art Museum in Chișinău, 4 April 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

#photography & visual arts

Tucked away on the sidelines of the global art world and surrounded by a dusty and unchanged canon, curator Dorota Monkiewicz is making a statement about her new exhibition of young Polish women artists simply through its unexpected Moldovan location.

‘Your body is a battlefield,’ proclaimed Barbara Kruger’s iconic poster from the 1989 Women’s March on Washington. Classic stories of successive waves of feminism say that it expanded the field of emancipation to include more and more previously overlooked groups. But from today’s perspective, it’s clear that women’s struggle has been more reminiscent of hybrid warfare than about gaining more footholds. Everything won with difficulty can be easily lost.

This is the key context behind the exhibition Lushness: Women’s Art in the 21st Century, curated by Dorota Monkiewicz at the National Art Museum of Moldova in Chisinau. The exhibition was prepared as part of the cultural programme of the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union – this alone holds significance for the art on show, as this is the presidency of a country with particular qualities, including uniquely strict anti-abortion laws, a constant striving for more global influence, economic challenges, and a complex geopolitical position.

When The Power of Fantasy exhibition was organised at Brussels’ BOZAR in 2011 as part of the previous Polish presidency, the atmosphere was completely different. Lushness promises a celebration of joie de vivre, sexuality, and togetherness with other humans and non-humans, but it is a celebration lined with horror. Economic development, European order, reproductive rights – all of these are proving extremely fragile today.

When Anna Grzymała paints a utopian parliament in which representatives of various social groups sit together with a whole plethora of other entities, from narwhals, shrimps and cats to shrubs and rivers, it is within the framework of a fantasy that is essentially the opposite of the real situation. When Viola Plaga-Głowacka depicts a knight in shining armour in a clash with Godzilla, she is not giving us pure fantasy. Just as the original Japanese tale of a beast from the depths of the sea was a clear metaphor for nuclear weapons, Głowacka’s scene is set against the backdrop of a demolished, burning Warsaw – an exaggerated ‘Battle of Empik’ from the 2020 Independence March. It is easy to surmise the forces behind the monster.

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Martyna Borowiecka's work from the exhibition ‘Lushness: Women’s Art in the 21st Century’ at the National Art Museum in Chișinău, 4 April 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

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The history of domestic exhibitions focusing entirely on women’s art dates back to the beginnings of Poland’s economic transformation. Prepared by Agnieszka Morawińska, the 1991 exhibition Polish Women Artists at the National Museum in Warsaw was significant for further research into herstories of art. More recently, several decades of the development of Polish art’s feminist history were in turn summed up by the recently concluded exhibition We Want the Whole Life: Feminisms in Polish Art by the curatorial collective Feminist Seminar at the State Art Gallery in Sopot. Exhibitions by female artists from this period have been described as straddling essentialism and constructivism: on the one hand, they are looking for some kind of universal female experience, on the other, they are looking at the social construct of sexuality, at how people train for a specific role practically from birth.

A high-profile exhibition focused on women’s painting, Paint, also Known as Blood: Women, Affect and Desire put together by Natalia Sielewicz at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art in 2019, moved beyond this bipolar divide, focusing on agency and the shaping of one’s own image – which meant it did not dwell on revealing how patriarchal constructs are created, but rather on dealing with their existence. Lushness follows a somewhat similar pattern, looking at the relationship of young Polish female artists to the reality they have come to live in, all while focusing on classical media – the lion’s share being painting, at times broken up by ceramics and textiles.

However, whereas the 2019 exhibition dealt almost exclusively with figuration, including the likes of Marlene Dumas and Miriam Cahn, in Lushness Dorota Monkiewicz gives a prominent place to abstraction, and instead of concentrating so much on expression and affect, she appreciates humour and self-irony. These are evident not only in obviously exaggerated figuration, such as the aforementioned utopian visions of Anna Grzymała, but also in the striking paintings of Julia Woronowicz, who, like Zofia Stryjeńska a century ago, creates a visually characteristic, complex vision of pre-Christian Slavic culture, blending truth with fiction while inventing a whole non-existent civilisation.

Humour is also subtly revealed in abstraction, as in Kinga Popiela’s monochrome Zwoje (Scrolls), partly rolled out in the middle of one of the rooms. These cardboard boxes, painted with one broad gesture of a paint-soaked sponge, seem almost like a parody of the typically‚masculine’ abstract expressionism and its star Jackson Pollock, who splashed industrial paint from a can onto monumental canvases spread out on the floor. Instead of attacking this sub-painting with a brush as if it were a dummy sabre, Popiela paints as if she were mopping the floor. In this sense, she continues the tradition of the first Polish feminist artists such as Maria Pinińska-Bereś, who transformed the ordinary domestic chores of the patriarchal model into performative feminine duties.

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Anna Panek, 'Ciepło', textile, 2019. Work from the exhibition ‘Lushness: Women’s Art in the 21st Century’ at the National Art Museum in Chișinău, 4 April 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

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Alongside herstorical fantasies and abstractions, Monkiewicz has also made room for descriptions of reality in the here and now, revealing the ambiguity hidden behind humour. The works of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas and Marta Nadolle in particular reveal, through their proximity, the tension between not only their different styles of figuration, but above all the positions of the female artists speaking. Mirga-Tas portrays her Roma community in Czarna Góra, emphasising how she is rooted in this place with practically every formal choice – from the use of patchwork compositions of fabric scraps from her own clothes and from those of her loved ones, to the compositions themselves, which she bases on photographs by her uncle Andrzej Mirga, an ethnographer who studies the Roma community from the inside.

The story of Mirga-Tas, today one of the most important artists of Polish origin, whose crowning achievement was a project prepared for the Polish pavilion at the penultimate Venice Biennale, escapes the usual pop culture pattern of career and class advancement, the first chapter of which is leaving one’s hometown for a big city, preferably a capital, and loosening ties with one’s home and community. Mirga-Tas studied law in Kraków, but never cut these ties, and after finishing her education, she returned to her roots. Even the monumental textiles for the Venice Biennale were created in collaboration with a group of women from her community.

It is no coincidence that Mirga-Tas’s fabric paintings are positioned at the opposite end of the room to Nadolle’s works, including one composition that is not painted, but embroidered. Nadolle’s use of needle and thread is completely different – where Mirga-Tas freely composes patterned, irregular pieces of fabric into monumental compositions, the former has embroidered a schematic image onto a small sub-image as if on a tambourine. She places a swan in the middle of the river on which her contemplative heroine stands – a self-portrait of the artist herself – and arranges the composition in several strips. There are colourful townhouses in the background, creating not so much a landscape pointing to a specific place, but rather a postcard image of a universal small town.

The scene is framed by the artist’s ambiguously melancholic slogan: ‘If I hadn’t left here, I would have already had a husband and children a long time ago.’ On the one hand, we sense relief in it – leaving means a loosening of social pressure, breaking out of the corset of strict moral norms. On the other hand, we are left to reflect on the price of this liberation, which is her continuation in the rather precarious condition of an artist and functioning in an environment based on competition rather than mutual support. So, we have both a classic tale of promotion but also the abandonment of one’s homeland, and although Nadolle’s work is characterised by a large dose of humour and irony, the picture she draws remains quite bitter.

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Opening of the exhibition ‘Lushness: Women’s Art in the 21st Century’ at the National Art Museum in Chișinău, 4 April 2025, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM.

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The city itself, however postcard-perfect, seems depopulated. Similarly, Warsaw in her paintings is transformed into a setting that brings to mind the works of Nikifor, with its boxy buildings depicted on a reduced scale, as if in a somewhat desperate attempt to tame a place that is alien and overwhelming. In fact we are in a world of double uprooting, torn between two deeply unsatisfying models. On the one hand, a world of conservative norms promising a sense of security at the expense of autonomy and self-determination; on the other, the neoliberal hell of professional insecurity and being a ‘girlboss’ at the expense of deeper relationships.

While defining painting as the primary medium for this young generation of female artists, Monkiewicz has quite unexpectedly placed her exhibition within an established context. On the floor above Lushness at the National Art Museum of Moldova, we can visit the venue’s permanent collection. Although it lacks even a word of introduction, two things are immediately striking, even if we don’t have much knowledge of 20th-century Moldovan art history. Firstly, unlike Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and also neighbouring Romania, the 20th century in Moldovan art – at least, according to the picture drawn by the museum – eschewed the neo-avant-garde and new media. It could be said that we are somewhere between the aforementioned countries, places where performance and video art developed new avenues, and Albania, where the socialist realist doctrine was in place for an exceptionally long time. Over the decades, we see a long persistence of solutions that are still impressionist or post-impressionist, up until the 1980s when we approach a slightly softer version of new expression.

What is strongly surprising, however, is that a large percentage of this collection consists of works by female artists – these are often images of women painted by other women, and surprisingly they are often in conversation with the contemporary paintings by Polish women downstairs. In fact, it is easy to distinguish at first glance which paintings are by whom. In the case of the female Moldovan artists Ana Baranovici, Eleonora Romanescu and Brunhild Epelbaum-Marcenco, their art has, above all, a personality and a history. In the case of the male artists’ works, they have, above all, bodies – for example, Ion Jumati’s eroticised depiction of village girls resting by a haystack.

'Lushness: Women’s Art in the 21st Century' in Chișinău – Image Gallery

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If one can speak of icons in Moldovan art of the last century, perhaps the greatest is Valentina Rusu-Ciobanu. Her early works from the 1950s are still marked by the influence of the Romanian impressionist Nicolae Grigorescu, while at the peak of her career there are influences of expressionism and surrealism. Specialising in portraits, however, this artist is perhaps closest to David Hockney during this period, albeit with a decidedly socialist rather than Californian bent. Interestingly, according to Rusu-Ciobanu, in the 1960s she used to read Romanian and Polish magazines on contemporary art – the only ones available in Chisinau at the time. Her historical references, in this case to the Italian Renaissance, combined with her portrayal of everyday realities and changes in customs, could make her the patron saint of painters such as Agata Kus, exhibited one floor below.

If the neo-avant-garde, most strongly associated with feminist art, is still able to provoke acts of censorship today – as in the famous 2019 case of Natalia LL and her Consumer Art at the National Museum in Warsaw – narratives about the female experience that stick to classical media remain safer, but also easier to overlook. A few years ago, Natalia Sielewicz highlighted a feminist art tradition other than the neo-avant-garde, one that grew out of the work of Cahn and Dumas. Dorota Monkiewicz’s exhibition, presented in this particular place alongside its permanent collection, may provoke questions about potential female patron saints from behind the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. Those who perhaps simply painted, because in the suffocating socio-political climate they could allow themselves little else.

^{Translated from Polish by Patryk Grabowski}

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