I heard a rumor once that, during a vernissage, artist Zbigniew Libera told his ex-wife, the artist Mariola Przyjemska, “Mariola, you have never been critical.” Since Przyjemska and I share a passion for fashion, I felt this accusation personally. As a writer and art critic I was interested in comparing works by these two artists to see what the specific conditions behind criticality are. The curiosity about their private relationship was a background motivation for the writing, although only traces of this made their way into the text.

       Under communism in the Polish People’s Republic, the body was the body of a worker made of stone. It often appeared on large-scale reliefs and mosaics on the walls of socialist realist architecture. The image was homogenous: strong, pure, and coarse figures with wide shoulders and large hands. Men and women were differentiated mainly by the length of their hair, as both sexes were represented equally and encouraged to perform physical labour. After the fall of communism, the body could finally fall apart too. 

       The body of artist Mariola Przyjemska appears throughout the catalogue for her solo exhibition Mariola Przyjemska. Consumption, Construction, and Melancholia which opened in 2022 in Zachęta National Art Gallery in Warsaw, more than thirty years after the fall of communism in Poland. The publication, printed on thick, glossy pages like a fashion magazine, features reproductions of Przyjemska’s works, essays by curators and art historians, as well as a selection of the artist’s private photographs: Mariola as a baby; Mariola at the art academy surrounded by friends and other fellow artists; Mariola with double winged eyeliner in a rooftop hotel bar in Warsaw; Mariola in black and white standing on the street with Zbigniew Libera during their civil marriage in 1992; or Mariola tanning topless on a rocky beach in Saronida. Each of these images features her name: Mariola mariola Mariola MARIOLA, like a logo of a fashion brand, repeated in different sleek typefaces. The exhibition was the first large retrospective of the artist, whose paintings and photographs documented the systemic transformation of Poland into a liberal democracy. Przyjemska pointed her eye and the camera lens towards American perfume flacons and alcohol bottles, the construction of glass skyscrapers, and clothing labels. In her work, these do not appear as mere things, but as long-anticipated objects of consumerist desire. In the catalogue, it is the artist who becomes the product herself, in a way that would have been impossible before 1989. Her body is sexed, her skin is tanned, she wears make-up, travels, partakes in the consumption of luxury goods, and makes them main protagonists of her work. Her artistic practice stands out from those of her contemporaries, specifically, in terms of how it interacts with the reality of political transformation. What is at stake for a female artist who takes part in the aesthetic experiences of capitalism in post-communist Poland?

       Libera, on the other hand, is the founding father of Sztuka Krytyczna (eng. Critical Art) – the movement that defined Polish art throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, evolving simultaneously with the systemic transformation of Poland from communism to a free-market democracy. As the art historian Izabela Kowalczyk points out, after years of distrust towards cultural institutions governed by communist regime censorship and propaganda, artists could now address and criticize the political reality. Kowalczyk describes the kind of “criticality” employed by Critical Art as an uncovering and a radical deconstruction of the violence of popular culture, a critique of mass consumption, the marginalization of non-normative bodies, and conservative politics of the very-present Catholic church. The fall of communism brought hopes of free and democratic public art institutions and introduced Polish artists to the art market. Critical Art openly expressed disappointment with these new institutional power structures and neoliberalism. As a response, their mediums of choice were mostly performance, video, photography, and installation: more ephemeral, open to participation and more difficult to commodify, as opposed to more passive and object-based such as sculpture or painting. The artists associated with the movement explored themes of sexuality, critiques of consumerism and the Catholic church, and anti-establishment politics before 1989, albeit on a small scale, underground, without institutional support.

       Before becoming a ‘critical artist’, Libera was engaged in the Kultura Zrzuty (Chip-in Culture) group present in Łódź from 1981 until 1987. It was a DIY collective of artists living and working in a private apartment who would chip in for food, rent, and materials in order to produce low-cost art works and organize shows and happenings. The group published the Tango zine, which often featured popular culture references, frivolous sex jokes, and ridiculed Catholic images – the first issue’s cover saw the Black Madonna from Częstochowa with a mustache drawn on with a thick black pen. The artistic practices of Kultura Zrzuty members were diverse, yet they shared a humorous, Dadaist, and postmodernist attitude. Their approach was rebellious and, although well-documented, Kultura Zrzuty remained an avant-garde and niche phenomenon during communism.

       Free-market democracy opened up the art scene to western influences and dismantled state censorship, making it possible for politically charged and radical art to appear in public institutions, although not without counterreaction. The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw was home to an atelier (the so-called “Kowalnia”) led by the sculptor Grzegorz Kowalski, whose students (including Paweł Althamer, Artur Żmijewski, or Katarzyna Kozyra) in the 90s made up the core of Critical Art. In comparison to Kultura Zrzuty’s Madonna, their gestures appear more confrontational. Jacek Markiewicz’s 1993 diploma work titled Adoration of Jesus Christ was a video in which the artist is seen naked laying next to a wooden cross while licking and erotically caressing the figure of Jesus Christ mounted on it. Even Kowalski, the supervisor of the diploma work found it to be an example of artistic narcissism, where the “artist’s ego overshadows everything else”^[1]. The piece was less about artistic qualities or concepts but more about the artist exercizing absolute freedom. Upon its conception, the work was shown in the National Art Gallery in Sopot and later in 2013 in Ujazdowski Castle Contemporary Art Center in Warsaw, receiving backlash from the conservative public for offending religious beliefs and attacking Polish national heritage. The artist claimed that the piece was created as both an insult and a gesture of adoration toward what he considered the “real God” in contrast to the God worshipped in Catholic churches across Poland.^[2] The work is radical in its iconoclastic intentions. Instead of the nihilistic or playful tone of Kultura Zrzuty, Markiewicz doesn’t want to simply ridicule or destroy God. Instead he makes a normative proposal of what the real God is.

       In a 1999 text on the culture wars between the traditionalists and the contemporary art scene dominated by Critical Art, Ryszard Kluszczyński recounts how, in the post-1989 era, it was no longer the state but rather the general public that attempted to control and censor art. In reaction to frequent explicit content and blasphemous inclusion of religious or political symbolism in Critical Art, Wojciech Wencel, a well-known Polish conservative writer, stated that artists of the Critical Artists movement should be pilloried, and people who admire their works should be sent to “psychiatric hospitals.”^[3]

       The body is a frequent protagonist of Libera’s works. Counter to the image of the worker’s body in socialist realist art, Critical Art, often having been interpreted as a delayed version of Western abject or body art, paved the way for a new body to emerge: open, sexualised, explicit, non-normative, bleeding, broken, animalistic, mutilated, and dirty.

       Libera produced video works, objects, installations, and performances that point a critical gaze on the different societal and institutional power structures in Polish history: communism, Catholicism, and capitalism. His best known series Corrective Devices consists of twisted objects referencing toys: overweight female dolls in old-school lingerie named Ken’s Aunt (1994) and The Doll You Love to Undress (1997) – naked dolls with their intestines spilling out of their open bellies – or the infamous Lego Concentration Camp (1999), a collection of Lego concentration camp sets consisting of barracks, crematoriums, and figures: the SS guards in black and skeleton-prisoners. For Critical Artists, the everyday objects under capitalism such as toys, desired by every child, are suspicious, and the innocent act of play is considered part of a process of gender formation and corporeal control. A Lego set can become an object lesson in efficiency with the logistical organisation of bodies and planning of genocide.

       Ken’s Aunt is a sarcastic comment on consumerist reality that favors the beautiful, young, and skinny Barbie over the unattractive, old, and overweight aunt. Instead of fetishizing Barbie’s body, the artist reveals her bowels and points to the abject reality of our decaying corpses, which capitalism tries to conceal by selling more products. The act of undressing or exposing is symptomatic to Critical Art: it aims to deconstruct existing power relations or to uncover unsettling truths about society by throwing a shade of suspicion onto something that is seemingly innocent, such as dolls or Lego blocks. Libera’s works criticize and disrupt by operating with irony, shock value, and provocation.

Mariola (speaking with the press): I had to cook, clean, do grocery shopping, and make art. Zbyszek only had to make art. [...] At some point we had to destroy my paintings to make more space in our apartment.^[4]

       The textbook interpretations of Critical Art omit that the artists representing it could enjoy and revel in presenting the abject, the disruptive, and the ugly of the social underbelly. In 2013, years after the prime of Critical Art, Libera staged a masochistic self-portrait photo series titled Wolny Strzelec (eng. “Freelancer”). He is seen standing naked on the side of a dirt road next to a suburban housing complex, impoverished and covered in mud, looking a bit like the behind-the-wall jumpscare from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The artist, whose genitals are in full frontal view, is being held up by a man in a dark-blue suit, like a criminal dissident or a bum. Taken as a commentary on the outsider position of the artist and his underprivileged and precarious “freelancer” position under neoliberalism, the work deploys irony and abjection. Here, Libera presents himself as an artist who, while having enjoyed a long career in the public eye, is unsupported by the market and social structures. He attempts to execute total freedom of expression and speak certain truths to the viewers, yet he is cast out for it. The harsher the repression, punishment, or censorship, the stronger the desire to transgress and break boundaries.

       Containing both the fantasy of the sin and its punishment, Libera’s works are exemplary of the dynamic that defines the conflict of artists rebelling against conservative structures. He presents the way subjects are produced within oppressive societies (communist, capitalist, Catholic). He is aware of the ways in which the works provoke and galvanize; hence he must cast himself out and perform a walk of shame with the policemen. Principially anti-capitalist, it’s the kind of art that, through its shock value, disrupts the conformist gaze.^[5] Yet, from a historical distance, Critical Art, with its moralistic-yet-provocative stance seems less capable of political change than interested in cultivating the aesthetics of disruption, public offence, and the grandiose role of the artist as the independent visionary.

       In April 2025, I wrote a text for a small fashion-themed exhibition in an off-space in Warsaw titled Wink. The show accentuated pleasurable aspects of the facade of the fashion spectacle. Mariola Przyjemska was one of the three exhibiting artists. The two others were women in their twenties whose artistic practices were indebted to Przyjemska’s, not only because all of them use the aesthetic vocabulary of luxury fashion design but because they do it ambiguously, often critiquing the fashion industry while openly disclosing their desire for expensive garments. The works on view were directed against the sentiment to dismiss fashion and its pleasures as classist, exclusionary, and harmful. Instead they addressed class and identity-related aspirations and fantasies as well as the fun superficiality of clothing.

       My approach to writing the text was to conduct short interviews with each of the artists, in the style of slick fashion and gossip magazines, asking about their art practice in relation to fashion, sartorial preferences, and what kind of outfit they’d like to be buried in. Przyjemska told me that her favorite brand was Giorgio Armani and her dream garment was a young body. In the text, I described her position in the Polish art scene as one outside of the Critical Art canon. I based my assessment on an essay by Izabela Kowalczyk titled “Przyjemska the Trickster” found in the Zachęta catalogue. Kowalczyk compares Przyjemska to a “trickster” figure who uses play on words, pastiche or irony to enact a distancing or produce ambiguity, and who ‘does not formulate radical postulates.’^[6] The trickster is often accused of cynicism, or as was allegedly in the case of Przyjemska, a lack of criticality. She is not here to expose or deconstruct but rather to complicate moral judgments and verbalise the unexpected.

       The curator of the Wink exhibition told me that Przyjemska was not happy with my assessment of her position being one outside the Critical Art canon. Critical Art has been male dominated, although a few of its most prominent figures were women, for example: Anna Baumgart, Katarzyna Kozyra, and Zofia Kulik. The genderedness of her exclusion doesn’t play out on the level of representation but the approach to art making. Rather than openly grappling with the topics of oppression and condoning, criticising, or deconstructing, she is interested in the way bodies and objects in capitalism are made to be desirable. For some, it can be synonymous with her being a victim of capitalism (and fashion) but I’d argue, following Kowalczyk, that she is more of a trickster, who introduces ambiguity to this victimized position.

       In a Vogue Poland interview about the Zachęta exhibition, one of its curators, Ewa Majewska explains that Critical Art was meant to look “ugly” as a way of signaling the purity of art in contrast to what is considered beautiful, attractive and therefore empty or commercial.^[7] Przyjemska’s works were therefore dismissed for being concerned with the feminine sphere of beauty, but Majewska situated Przyjemska in relation to the weak avant-garde: ‘Przyjemska’s play with the cuteness of color, scale, cartoonish simplifications, sentimentality and soft, non-aggressive humor, marks her artwork since the late 1980s, making her an atypical Critical Artist, long forgotten and hidden in the shadow of her much more famous husband.’^[8]

       In the Wink exhibition, Przyjemska presented two works. One of them was Kid’s Piss  (1996), which is part of her most well-known series of works Labels (1993–2002). In the 1990s, she collected over 5,000 clothing labels and made large-scale photographs of them, so that nearly each thread is visible. Some of the photos were encased in Perspex, like scientific specimens. The labels are silly, scratchy, annoying, often forgotten items, but as the artist herself stated, they are the objects closest to the body. They have the power of making a garment acquire additional value, a mechanism of commodity fetishization. The artist often altered the writing on the pieces before photographing them. The Kid’s Piss work is a humorous alternance – the title is a misreading of bis Kids writing on the clothing label. The background of the tag is blue but the writing itself is yellow and the threads trail around like droplets of urine. In Frontfix, the Croatian laundry instructions have been changed so that chemisko čišćenje (eng. “chemical cleaning”) reads etnisko čišćenje (eng. “ethnic cleansing”), a straight-forward commentary on the Bosnian war. This work is maybe the closest Mariola Przyjemska gets to Critical Art albeit without as much shock value, as it doesn’t present any graphic imagery or symbols from the war, as one might expect a Critical Artist would do. Those unfamiliar with the Croatian language could not notice the change on the label. It is a subtle gesture, made with thread and needle (belonging to the feminine sphere of homemaking).

       The other work Przyjemska presented in Wink was a small, marble sculpture of the Michelin man made in 2024. His fat body with its iconic rolls lay on the ground surrounded by colorful pompoms made of yarn. It was just around Easter time and Przyjemska likened the sculpture to baby Jesus and the balls to Easter eggs. One imagines the Michelin man in the role of Jesus with cute and colorful pompoms, without the usual seriousness or suffering surrounding his representation. The artist deploys the religious reference tenderly and playfully, without grandeur or antagonism towards Catholicism, unlike many of the Critical Artists. It is a sinful baby Jesus; he ate all the chocolate Easter eggs and is now sick as a result of his gluttony. We can’t pray to him but we can pity him. It is not a harsh disavowal or critique but nor is it an affirmation either. It offsets the fantasy about how this representation could subvert or ridicule our belief in both the Michelin man and Jesus Christ. 

       Przyjemska’s other works feature objects such as lipsticks painted as if they were buildings, eye shadow palettes that look like country flags, or photographs of the construction of the highrises in Warsaw. She often references art historical movements such as constructivism or geometric abstraction. In the beginning of her artistic career she was interested in mysticism and created a series titled Mystical Paintings (1984–1991). Those were large-scale partially abstract images of architectural crosses, ornaments, or blood chalices on monochromatic backgrounds, mainly in red, black, white, and yellow. One of these works, Untitled from 1988, which was part of her Academy diploma (supervised by painter Tadeusz Dominik), features a quote from the Book of Revelations, three crosses symbolizing Holy Trinity, and a black and white face in the upper part of the painting sticking its tongue out towards a rose flower located at the bottom. It presents a vastly different approach to Catholic religion than Critical Art. The painting is neither affirmative nor confrontational. The face on the canvas is eerie, painted in an abstract manner, without detail or indication of any gender. The rose and the tongue signal desire or longing in relation to Catholic symbols, albeit in a softer, more spiritual form, and hidden behind metaphor rather than the explicit sexual act performed on Jesus on the cross by Jacek Markiewicz. In my opinion, the way in which Przyjemska presents symbols in the Mystical Paintings could be symptomatic of her approach towards consumer goods in her later works. She is interested in ways in which the alcohol bottles, and clothing labels appear holy, ornamental, and acquire the status of a fetish, likening religious fulfilment to the acts of consumption in capitalism.

       Designed in the style of a fashion magazine, the Zachęta catalogue places Przyjemska’s private photographs in the spots typically reserved for full-page advertisements. In an issue of Vogue we’d see a Loewe spread, Dua Lipa’s Yves Saint Laurent campaign, or Calvin Klein’s “Obsession” perfume editorial, but here we get Mariola. The private images of Przyjemska blur the line between the body and the object and introduce autobiographical elements into her work: here she appears as the artist, the brand-object, as well as the artwork. She is not in full control of herself and her desire. She is shown beautiful, naked, well-dressed, wearing make up, playing, enjoying holidays and time with friends – an epitome of a body produced by capitalism.

       If communism tried to achieve equality among laboring subjects through aesthetic simplicity and purity in corporeal representation, capitalism projects a unified, shiny, and desirable image of the body, equipped with the accessories of consumption documented by Przyjemska. The “falling apart” of the body performed by Critical Artists can be seen as a reaction against both communism and capitalism, using the abject and taboo to break away from the image of the body as subordinate to the state or capital. By contrast, Przyjemska might appear uncritical as she does not partake in this aesthetic refusal of consumption. But she also does not intend to affirm capitalism but rather to look at the influence of commodities on desire – this is the gendered aspect of her work. She speaks from the perspective of a woman-trickster in Armani or Balenciaga who isn’t trying to oppose the system but is placed inside it.

       Przyjemska’s works remain a challenge to the definition of criticality as practiced by Libera or Markiewicz. She is honest about what she desires – whether it's clothes, cosmetics, alcohol, or religious experiences, to a point where she can be considered uncritically complicit with capitalism or Catholicism. The Critical Artists’ desire is focused on their own agency and artistic position – seemingly all they have left after having disavowed the pleasures of consumerism, fantasies about capitalistic bodies, or Catholicism-driven national identity. In order to be critical they must be hurt. As most artists in capitalism, they are unable to fulfill the fantasies of artistic potential, blaming the market and institutions. As most of us do, Przyjemska continues to dream about an unattainable body from another time. Desire is present in both her work and that of her husband: they both are, to quote Joan Copjec, orthopsychic subjects. Aware of their internal split, they often desire something to their own detriment.

Zbigniew: Mariola, you have never been critical.

Mariola: Zbigniew, all you do is make art, that’s even worse.

Zbigniew: Mariola, you have never been critical of me. I love you.

^[1] https://culture.pl/pl/tworca/jacek-markiewicz
^[2] https://culture.pl/pl/tworca/jacek-markiewicz
^[3] Ibid.
^[4] M. Przyjemska, “Miałam na głowie gotowanie, sprzątanie, zakupy i sztukę. Zbyszek tylko sztukę.” [I Had To Have Cooking, Cleaning, Shopping and Making Art On My Mind. Zbyszek Only Had To Make Art.], interview by Monika Redzisz, Wysokie Obcasy, September 15, 2022, accessed July 28, 2025, Mariola Przyjemska: Miałam na głowie gotowanie, sprzątanie, zakupy i sztukę. Zbyszek tylko sztukę
^[5] I. Kowalczyk, “Ciało i władza. Polska sztuka krytyczna lat 90” [Body and Power. Polish Critical Art in the 90s], Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2002, p. 108.
^[6] I. Kowalczyk “Przyjemska the Trickster” in Mariola Przyjemska. Consumption, Construction, and Melancholia, Warszawa, Wrocław: Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Contemporary Museum Wrocław, 2022, p. 152.
^[7] Mariola Przyjemska: Szminki jak pistolet
^[8] E. Majewska, “Towards a Weak Avant‑Garde, Re‑Shaping the Canon,” Arts 12, no. 2 (2023): 70, https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12020070