Her art is like a high-class girl - refined, elegant and free of any triviality. Monika Szwed doesn't go looking for inspiration in contemporary reality, she doesn't dabble in sociology and she isn't politically active.

Her private mythology is rich with meaning, and made up of a few motifs that reoccur in her work. The main figures in the artist's drawings are children, copied from photographs taken a few decades ago - in groups, alone, caught playing or studying, their dress conforming to child fashions of the 40's or 50's. The second important thread running through Szwed's art is her precise recreation of villa architecture, presenting a whole range of styles spanning from the historicism of the peak of the 19th century to the functionalism of the 1930's. The artist arranges these designs culled from the past alongside her other favorite props - hallucinogenic mushrooms and bunny rabbits - to surprising effect.
The drawings of the Innocent Homes series are, in the respect of these motifs, an extension of the artist's debut exhibit of last year (23 Koans, Zderzak Gallery, 2005). The coloristic and compositional virtues of her drawings have developed in a way, however, which grants them a specific weight that approaches refined painting.
In Innocent Homes, the artist uses yellow/cream-colored 50x70 paper, which serves as a background for her carefully thought-out compositions and contrasts with her vivid color spectrum of sketched motifs scattered about the space of the Bristol board. Szwed situates whitened turquoise next to olive green, bright patches of violets, yellows, ultramarine and reds with black and dark brown accents. The surrealist melancholy of her work is a distant echo of works by painters from the pittura metafisica circle. Their precise drawings and compositional discipline recalls the aesthetic of the art of ancient Japan. Szwed's most recent work also bears comparison with that of the American artist Amy Cutler.

Monika Szwed on her latest work:
One day, I drew a house.
It was a pre-war house with enormous windows.
After 4:00 p.m. sunlight fell through the windows, and it was a kind of "afternoon hour during which the plains intend to speak and never do, or perhaps they speak infinitely and we don't understand them, or we understand it's all as untranslatable as though it were music."
In the house's interior you could be surprised by your shadow and become a child once more and feel again how it was "to not miss anyone" (...)
I drew that house and all I knew was that something had occurred. Just like when there's an eclipse and people say that the summer will be cold and the river's water overflows its banks. Of course, none of that will happen (or maybe it will?). Sometimes people are only waiting for a sign.
My house, my symbol, but in a primordial sense the uniting of a whole. Perhaps: a whole once lost.
And so I dug this house out of my "atavistic memory," and then another, and the next. The whole was surprisingly simple and naive. Surprisingly simple...

We welcome you to attend the opening of the exhibit on 14 June, 6:00 p.m.
The exhibit will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring facsimiles of the artist's work

Monika Szwed was born in 1978, in Poznan. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. She graduated in the field of Artistic Education under the guidance of Prof. Alicja Kepinska, as well as from the Multimedia Faculty, under Prof. Piotr Kurka. She is the recipient of the 3rd edition of the "Young Poland" Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage scholarship program.