Zachęta Project Room

curator of the exhibition: Magda Kardasz
cooperation: Pola Gadowska

Living and working together as a duo, we cultivate our own microcosm, a shared space where we embark on various artistic and hobby projects. Functioning as a research team, we support each other through successive projects. Of course it’s our joint artistic endeavour, but we are interested in more than just producing new works and exhibitions. Our goal is to understand the world we live in a little better and, within our modest means, to captivate viewers to such an extent that they abandon, if only for a moment, the notion that there’s nothing interesting around them, that everything is mundane and dreary. 

Małgorzata Pawlak i Mikołaj Kowalski

Małgorzata Pawlak and Mikołaj Kowalski are a duo in life and art, authors of exhibitions in which they have presented individual works in dialogue with each other. As they themselves say, they share similar interests, readings and sources of inspiration. The exhibition they prepared for the Zachęta Project Room was also created as a duo and entitled There’s Nothing Here. It’s hard to imagine a more paradoxical title, given that the artists’ creative approach leads them to seek adventures in their immediate surroundings, to be enthralled by the tenacity and abundance of urban nature, to uncover fragments of the cosmos on a rooftop, or to discern echoes of the Big Bang in a microscopic speck of dust in their studio. Małgorzata and Mikołaj both studied painting and continue to paint, but their artistic practice has a strong conceptual foundation. In addition to paintings, the exhibition includes sculptures and objects/mobiles. The collaborative sculpture Don’t Panic, crafted by Pawlak and Kowalski for their exhibition in the Zachęta Project Room, stands as a visual enigma.

Through their art, artists express a profound appreciation for nature in its diverse forms – be they mutated, imperfect or eradicated by man as harmful. This represents a true extension of the concept of beauty and a pro-ecological approach.

The exhibition There’s Nothing Here leaves its viewers in a heightened state of awareness, eager to explore both the micro and macro worlds, their governing laws, and, crucially, ready to protect the nature that surrounds us.

Małgorzata Pawlak and Mikołaj Kowalski studied painting at the Faculty of Arts of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) in Lublin. In 2023 they completed their studies at the UMCS Doctoral School of Humanities and Art. They live and work in Lublin.

www.malgorzatapawlak.com
www.mikolajkowalski.pl