She received a master’s degree from the Faculty of Graphic Art of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She has received two scholarships from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (2005, 2012). She lives and works in Warsaw.
Creative description
Monika Zawadzki creates simple forms using such media as sculpture, painting and video. She has devised her own visual language of expression based on repeatable motifs. The colours used by Zawadzki are most often limited to black and white. Less often – as a consequence of the qualities of the materials used for the making of the works - her creations become completely translucent. (Discomfort (Dyskomfort, 2010); Water Sculptures (Rzeźby wodne, 2010); Gloves (Rękawiczki) and Wet Table (Mokry stół both from 2012). Her works presented in the framework of individual and group exhibitions often constitute complex spatial installations.
The main topic of the artist’s creativity is the creation of identity shown by means of shapes devoid of the qualities of individualism. This was the central theme of Zawadzki’s large individual exhibition entitled Anyone, which was organized in 2010 at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle. The curator of the showing wrote:
Anyone is of course about identity, the lack of identity and, what’s worse, about the lack of need for identity. No identity, no qualities. That is why Anyone blurs the faces of figures, women, we see a profile or a pulp, we do not see anything else, a contour, a specific solid of a sculpture speaks, being however deprived of meaningful details, differences, unification, and if there is a difference it is rather like the difference between anyone and anybody. Here there is a lack of a subject, the subject is random […] Zawadzki’s Anyone is like a projection screen, an obvious association proportional to the amount of projectors at the exhibition. Anything and everything can be screened there. But there are certain framework topics, or maybe not topics but rather a form, which somehow organizes this, and the artist, the aesthete is responsible for this form. This is a critical aesthete, a visual artist critically disposed toward reality, who processes reality aesthetically. A graphical essence, a core, but the content is political.
Humans and animals
In the series Rights for Humans and Animals (Prawa dla ludzi i zwierząt) which consists of drawings and graphics from the years 1995-2008, the artist, by declaring her reserve towards the addressed issues, inclines the viewer to individually analyse the position of the individual and the socio-ethical dependencies between various beings: man and man, man and animal, man and woman. Zawadzki, by means of slogans and visual messages, provokes thought on the basic values and laws that are in force in the world. She raises questions about violence and domination, and the coexistence of entities in the framework of social, biological or political orders.
Among the important issues addressed by the artist are the problems of the food chain and metabolism which show the interdependencies between humans, animals and the world of organisms. The curator Joanna Sokołowska points to the equality of many entities and to the equality of animate and inanimate matter in Zawadzki’s works:
Monika Zawadzki’s works assume a view of the world from the perspective of an alien who ignores earthly hierarchies. By situating herself close to post-humanistic thought, she questions the anthropocentric perspective, and undermines the relation of domination that exists between humans and animals, species, genders, organic matter and creations of culture.
Many works by Zawadzki have in them something of propagandistic and agitational performances, however, the meaning of these creations, which may be considered works of the artistic activism movement, is utterly humanistic. The artist often shows the figure of 'the Other' as an animal, equating humans and animals and broadening the traditional understanding of love. The artist’s interest in the issues concerning relations between men and also between men and animals evolved in the direction of an interest in matter as such, including inanimate matter.
Matter
This is how Monika Zawadzki characterized her interest in matter in a text that accompanied the individual exhibition Blackbird, which was held at the SVIT Praha gallery in 2011:
The history of matter is unknown. The accumulation of experiences of earlier states and arrangements is registered subconsciously. A person that confronts him or herself with an object – a body of unknown, alien and everlasting matter – should identify with this object in a natural way. Objects are active, stimulating, oppressive bodies with which one is forced to establish relations. The memory of matter commits us to responsibility for the things we own. Creating new objects is dangerous because of the risk of interacting with other matter. By giving new meanings, the forming of objects from matter causes the partial cleaning of earlier states from matter.
The topic of exclusion
Zawadzki addresses the issues of exclusion and social restrictions. She focuses attention on the mechanisms of the functioning of individuals; on individuals’ diversity, corporealness and the impossibility of reaching an agreement. These themes appear in such works as Skipping Rope ( Skakanka, 2006, 2009), which was at first realized as a graphic and later as a video based on photographs, Sausagey Lovers (Kiełbasiani kochankowie, 2006), which tells about the physiology and spirituality of sausages, in the sculpture Bathtub (Wanna, 2011) which is kind of an anthropomorphic, bothersome costume that has openings that correspond to the particular limbs and the head of a man, or in the poster Sausagey Anarchy (2009).