Małgorzata Mycek (b. 1993, Sanok) is a painter and performance artist whose work emerges from the intersection of lived terrains of rural life and queer experience. Interrogating the romanticised myths of countryside aesthetics and the silences that surround them, Mycek examines peripherality not as an idyllic condition but as a complex, politically charged space of identity, memory, and resistance.
Working across painting, textile, and performance, his practice draws on vernacular craft traditions – often learned through local networks – while refracting them through contemporary queer narratives and strategies of emancipation. In this way, Mycek’s art resists easy categorisation. Grounded in the folk histories and lived realities of the Bieszczady region, Mycek’s work foregrounds marginalised perspectives and engages critically with the patriarchal, sexist, and social structures embedded in both rural life and artistic institutions, destabilising homogenising portrayals of the countryside without nostalgia. Through an often bold and expressive visual language, Mycek explores how queer identity, local mythologies, and communal memory intersect within the fabric of everyday life.
Transmutations of Rural Worlds
One of Mycek’s recent works, showcased at the 47th Biennale Malarstwa Bielska Jesień 2025, powerfully exemplifies this trajectory. Awarded the Grand Prix, he was recognised “for the bold rewriting of the visual geography of the village: sensitive, ironic, and political at once, redefining it as a space of resistance, community, and queer imagination.” The jury’s statement noted how Mycek’s suite of works, such as Transmutacja (2024), Miecz na młot na czarownice (2024), and Upał jak diabli (2024), refract the rural landscape through a lens that unsettles conventional tropes and opens space for queer subjectivities within local imaginaries.
These paintings and mixed-media pieces render the countryside not as a picturesque backdrop but as a “visual geography” that holds emotional and political stakes, where mythic figures, folkloric motifs, and contemporary queerness intersect in unexpected, provocative ways. His imagery often evokes the uncanny and the fantastic, with spectral forms and animated landscapes that both honour and subvert local legends and folk narratives.
Vernacular Bodies and Queer Presence
Earlier sequences in Mycek’s oeuvre similarly reframe rural labour and bodies in ways that disrupt patriarchal visual traditions. In works such as Żniwiarka (2023) and Siewczyni (2023), figures associated with agricultural labour appear empowered and self-possessed, queerly animated rather than objectified or romanticised. These works, executed in bold acrylic on banner formats, assert a presence that is local and specific yet resonant with broader questions about gender, labour, and visibility.
By placing such figures at the centre of his pictorial world, Mycek once again recalibrates inherited visual languages of rural life, where bodies in motion, sweat, labour, and community counter the flattened sentimentalities through which countryside imagery is often consumed. His work persistently asks: Who gets to tell country stories, and from which place of vantage?
Beyond their physicality, Mycek’s figures carry narratives of resilience and survival. He has often reflected on returning to his home village, noting how his work is inseparable from lived experience. In an interview with K MAG, he noted that he treats “painting, performance, and textiles as tools for telling the story of the village – not the romanticised or demonised version, but the real, multi-dimensional one.”
Material Practices and Craft Engagements
Beyond painting, Mycek’s engagement with craft and materiality is a vital dimension of his practice. This interest is visible in works that meld traditional techniques with contemporary concerns – stretching the boundaries between fine art and vernacular making. In recent years, he has worked in tapestry and wood, producing pieces such as Walka kota z zaskrońcami (2025), a wool tapestry incorporating linen, pyrography, and stained wood, and I’m not like other girls — I am a man (2024), a sculptural work in wood that plays with gendered tropes through material heft and gesture.
Each of these works reflects an ongoing dialogue between local craft traditions and queer embodiment, foregrounding artisanal labour as both conceptual anchor and tactile register in his work. His textile works and tapestries, alongside his painterly output, reflect a commitment to mediums that embody care, labour, and transmission across generations. Through these forms, Mycek underscores how craft can be both a material practice and a conceptual terrain, re-envisioned through queer, intersectional lenses.
Across these bodies of work, Mycek’s practice embodies a sustained inquiry into how rural spaces can serve simultaneously as grounds for collective histories and sites of queer futurity. Rather than dwell in nostalgia, his visual world insists on complexity: on the tensions between memory and transformation, tradition and disruption, belonging and otherness.
Małgorzata Mycek describes himself as a “country queer with a Master’s degree in Painting”, obtained in 2020 at the University of Arts in Poznań. This graduate work garnered several recognitions, including honourable mention in the Allegro Prize 2021 and finalist status in the Maria Dokowicz competition and the Hestia Artistic Journey competition. He co-founded the Wydawnictwo Bomba initiative, which was awarded in the national Młode Wilki 2019 competition for promoting engaged art and grassroots publishing. In 2025, he won the Grand Prix at the Bielska Jesień Painting Biennale. He is a part of the Umysł Biedaka collective.
