Monika Misztal finds her inner strength primarily in the consistency that characterises all her actions. However, she also sees this consistency as her weakness – the obstinacy preventing her from accepting a compromise that could benefit her in the long run. Currently, the artist is working on her solo exhibition at the MOLSKI Gallery, set to open in late 2025.
Monika Misztal: I once saw Michał Molski on the street three times – on the same day! I thought it was destiny. That’s it. It couldn’t have been a coincidence – those are the signs that the world sends us. We meet people for a reason. We meet them because together we have something important to say.
Krzysztofa Kornacka: Do you feel that way about him?
M.M.: Yes, because we have a certain extremity in common.
K.K.: An extremity?
M.M.: What convinced me was the fact that he’s a racing driver rather than his affinity for art. I knew that if this type of person gets involved, they will give one hundred per cent. Just like a racing driver – if they enter the car, they want to become a world champion. They don’t do anything half-heartedly. I’m like that, too.
K.K.: You generally feel that you have enough control within yourself to be able to work steadily, productively. Can you recall a stage in your career when you were unable to motivate yourself to paint?
M.M.: It all depends on why I fall and why I get up. I had a moment like that once in my life. At that time, I had no roof over my head, no money – even to buy bread or a brush. It was impossible to paint then. Apart from that, even when I was ill, I painted. With tears in my eyes, I painted. I believe that artists become boring and repetitive because they keep giving and have no time to think. Personally, I read and watch a lot, experience things, and paintings somehow appear along the way; the themes somehow emerge. It’s not like I paint a series of twenty paintings and the next day I create twenty for the next series. I have to take some time to recuperate, to read, watch, collect material, and think about it.
K.K.: Keeping in mind your history and where you are right now, are you at a place where you could identify strengths and weaknesses in your painting?
M.M.: I think it is my consistency. It’s both my strength and weakness. I am tenacious. This stubbornness becomes a weakness when you need to save your own life. Once, I didn’t go to an exhibition because I said I wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t show the paintings if I didn’t get what I deserved. He thought I was joking – that I would turn myself into a victim, that I would do those paintings anyway and go to the show. It was not a joke to me, but people don’t take me seriously.
K.K.: Why do you think people don’t take you seriously?
M.M.: Because they see me as an overtly emotional and impulsive person. And yet if I plan any paintings, I always make them. Never have I failed to deliver paintings that someone commissioned or was awaiting. Though they don’t understand it if I say that I am unable to do a show this year. You will, they say. I say I won’t. You will. Two rooms. One. Two, one, two… That’s what I’m talking about. People just don’t listen to me. They don’t hear what I want to tell them.
“I think it is my consistency. It’s both my strength and weakness. I am tenacious. This stubbornness becomes a weakness when you need to save your own life.”
— Monika Misztal
K.K.: Your paintings are very expressive – blunt in their form and expression. In a sense, they seem like your scream. Do you feel like it might stem from the lack of acceptance and understanding?
M.M.: I definitely want to be understood. I want to be clear and transparent. What I show is very simple to me because this is the language that I have developed for myself. Expressive. Symbolic.
K.K.: When did you start painting this way?
M.M.: Everyone says I’ve been painting like this all my life.
K.K.: Your first pieces at university were like that, too?
M.M.: Yeah. Stach Szabłowski pointed out that now I paint with a background, that the person is embedded in the surroundings, and the surroundings influence what happens in the painting. And before that it was flat. Everything flat. As if it were disconnected. Maybe I was disconnected, too.
K.K.: What about your subjects? What did you start with?
M.M.: I had this series of non-talking heads. They were heads in these kinds of helmets, unable to say anything. They had these big eyes, but their mouths were hidden somewhere. The helmets deprived them of air. That was my first series.
K.K.: Looking at your work, I feel like the customary comparison to Andrzej Wróblewski actually has some foundations.
M.M.: I wasn’t familiar with Wróblewski when I was creating them. I was so young at the time, maybe 22… I wasn’t interested in all that yet.
K.K.: Representation in those paintings is clearly more obvious than in your current works, isn’t it? Even when looking at two recent works in progress in your studio, you seem to make a figurative depiction abstract. It’s really cool. You seem to know what it’s about, but at the same time, there’s something about it….
M.M.: It’s anyone’s guess.
K.K.: It could be a pig, it could be a colourful blob. And that’s what’s so utterly fascinating. Tell me, why did you decide to paint portraits? Lately, you’ve been doing quite a lot of them.
M.M.: Money. It’s a skill I acquired while studying at the Academy. It’s interesting because for the exam, the model’s face was drawn by a friend. For the first year, I didn’t draw faces at all. I was so scared that I didn’t even try. Eventually, I promised myself that I had to learn it. I gained the skill, so now I use it to make money.
K.K.: You often paint yourself. You did this portrait of yourself wearing a crown and this excellent work referencing the suffering of Joan of Arc. I find it interesting that as you were doing the portraits, you started using them to speak about yourself, frequently assuming different roles. Where did you get the idea to depict yourself specifically as Joan of Arc?
M.M.: Joan of Arc is the patron of mentally ill people. Also, when painting these pictures, I felt discriminated against in the gallery. I decided to wear the crown myself.
K.K.: You once said that if someone were to paint your portrait, it would be Edvard Munch. Is it because he explored the theme of anxiety so strongly?
M.M.: I think it’s about his sensibility. I feel there’s a strong kinship between us. I see it even in the manner in which he drew lines and layered paint. For me, it’s obvious we have something in common – much more than with Wróblewski, for instance.
K.K.: Would you say that Munch is your favourite painter? Or is it someone else, or do you have several?
M.M.: Munch, Wróblewski and Makowski. Perhaps… Nacht-Samborski.
“The planned series of paintings takes viewers on a journey through my memories. Recollecting key events, I ask myself the question: who am I?”
— Monika Misztal
K.K.: What about the so-called rebel artists such as Nitka or Markowski?
M.M.: I’m not drawn to it at all. It’s too wild. Maybe we’re as close as siblings – it’s an incestuous relationship in a way. Maybe it’s so close to me that I have to dislike it for it to be able to grow.
K.K.: Monika, you have a deep awareness when it comes to your painting. Word on the street is that you paint fast – and you actually do – but as we’re having this conversation and I’m observing your process first-hand, I can see that every brushstroke is absolutely deliberate. Up until this point, we have spoken a lot about your past, so now I would like to move on to the future. You are currently working on a series of paintings for your first solo show at the MOLSKI Gallery. Could you briefly tell us what kind of work it will feature?
M.M.: It will be one of my most significant journeys. The planned series of paintings takes viewers on a journey through my memories. Recollecting key events, I ask myself the question: who am I? Through my painting, I look at myself from a distance and simultaneously deeply inside. It brings renewed anguish and unbearable pain. I reconstruct situations and relations with my loved ones. I do all this to understand where I was, what matters to me, what kind of person I am. There will be self-portraits, a monumental figure of a father, me kneeling alone in front of a mirror. Landscape, slightly neglected, felled forest or stacked piles of cut trees – a bit abstract, having their own rhythm, their own pattern.
There will be animals: a raging horse beaten by an uncle, a dead pig lying upside down, a beheaded chicken, a cow in a pasture and a skull that remains after it. Crying mother and fragments of things about which I am unable to speak, I can only paint. Red eye, bloody ear, swollen, bruised hands, hair on a brush. There will be still-lifes: soap out of scale, string, knife and mirror. There will also be some flowers. I want them to be symbolic messages. They might be symbolic of themselves. My painting will be an attempt at recreating events.
K.K.: It sounds as if this exhibition will be extremely personal…
M.M.: I’ve been told I shouldn’t approach painting so personally, but I can’t paint anything else for the time being. A lot has happened in my life… I experience the world so intensely that, for now, what’s inside of me is enough.
K.K.: Your inner world, the way you perceive reality, and what you absorb every day, such as literature and art, turn out to be sufficient sources of inspiration for you?
M.M.: Yes. It would be great if they taught how to write nicely at universities. But they didn’t teach us anything.
K.K.: Could you start teaching painting?
M.M.: Yes and no. My painting would bear the brunt of that, for sure. Everything that happens in my life revolves around my painting. When I’m not sitting with a brush in front of the easel, I’m printing or collecting or browsing materials.
K.K.: I see. You’re totally committed to one thing. And can you imagine yourself at the academy where you run your own studio, guiding students?
M.M.: Perhaps as a visiting professor. For example, I could take a break every ten years or so to see what the young generation is up to.
K.K.: That would be something. Imagine going to the university every ten years. What would your advice be to people who choose the difficult profession of an artist?
M.M.: Never give up.
K.K.: And what’s your biggest dream, Monika?
M.M.: I think to have exhibitions in significant institutions, nationally and internationally. That’s where I see myself. I have no complexes about it.
K.K.: Is there anything you would like to see resounding at the end?
M.M.: Support the artists, don’t exploit them.
Krzysztofa Kornacka – artistic director of MOLSKI Gallery, board member of MOLSKI ART FOUNDATION, art historian, and curator. Involved with MOLSKI since its founding, co-curates the substantive programme of both the gallery and the foundation. Specialises in the art of the 21st century, including the application of Polish art of the new generation, and corresponding to corporeality and performance. Curator and organiser of exhibitions in Poland and abroad, responsible, among others, for institutions in Berlin and Paris. In her curatorial practice, she combines a critical sensibility with art history. In her work, she combines aesthetic expertise with knowledge of access to the art market and its institutional background. Graduated in art history from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
