Paintings by Mia Dudek [Warsaw Gallery Weekend 2025]

In her third exhibition with the gallery, Mia Dudek departs from the medium of photography – so far integral to her explorations on the body and space – in favour of painting, attempting to define a new language of expression. The works that emerge are not so much a formal change as a significant ontological shift. These paintings are not meant to depict; but to act as organic events, bodily discharges that materialise from the tension between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, the spoken and the unspoken. 

The inspiration for this series of works was a reflection on bodily inefficiency – not as a flaw, but as a liminal state in which the subject is forced to reformulate their understanding of the body, purpose, and identity. In the spirit of Virginia Woolf’s essay, “a state of physical and mental confusion radically changes the perception of the world – it strikes at the elementary order of existence, creating a turning point in which the individual withdraws from the previously woven networks of relationships, desires and goals”. This state of “organic collapse” opens the eyes to what is barely noticeable. The accompanying turn inward, which may be read as potential desertion or alienation, marks the first stage of an ongoing transformation.

Dudek’s painting is not about illustrating this transformation, but about experiencing it somatically. The paintings are nested compositions—structures in which repetition and multiplication serve as transducers of emotions and tensions. The compositions are meant to resemble palimpsests, in which successive layers of matter and meanings are arranged into forms – fluid, soft, physiological. Their organic, sometimes sensual form evokes blood, tears, secretions – not as an ornament, but as psycho-history. A deliberate, unproductive productivity against the current. Each painting is an echo of another, a processing, an accumulation, a surge, a repetition that does not seek a final form but remains in a state of constant formulation.

In this exhibition, echoes of her previous practice are to continue to resonate: explorations of the relationship between body and architecture, between private intimacy and the impersonal structure of dwelling. After years of working with brutalist architecture and materials of a cold, often oppressive nature, Dudek continues her gesture towards the interior – without abandoning the questions of boundaries: the body as both interior and surface, painting as a place where substance and intention switch places. Present elements intentionally merge with earlier ones, signalling continuity within the entirety of her practice.