Who is Frozen Charlie? It’s a porcelain doll popular in the Victorian era, and an allusion to a cautionary tale about a girl named Charlotte, who was too lightly dressed and froze to death on her way to a New Year’s Ball. As her companion and loved one, Charlie, saw the frozen girl, his heart promptly broke with sorrow.

Frozen Charlie is the third solo exhibition of works by Monika Szwed at the Zderzak Gallery. The show includes a series of drawings (oil pastels on paper) and an installation.

Monika Szwed is the most enigmatic artist of the new generation. Not just because she consciously seeks isolation and silence to draw her few pastels monthly. Her art doesn't fall in line with the current mainstream, which is why she continues to escape the notice of curators, and those audiences who follow seasonal trends.
Monika mainly draws from two sources of painting - the language of the Italian trans-avant-garde and the poetics of Chinese painting.
The aesthetics of emptiness, the multiplicity of perspectives in the space of a single composition, the rhetoric of the gesture, and the philosophy of wu-wei (non-action), all this is the Eastern tradition.
The play with scale, the sophisticated colour, subtle drawing technique, metamorphosis of the picture, and eccentricity of narration, this is the trans-avant-garde tradition, mainly of the art of Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi. Monika draws from this language - a major source of art from the 80's - above all at the instance of Professor Piotr Kurka, in whose studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan she studied.

Every individual exhibition - and the artist has had three to date, all at Zderzak - brings new surprises.
And provides more evidence of her deep feeling for space and colour, and her growing maturity.
Monika's star is rising slowly, but it will soon occupy a substantial portion of the heavens.

In her commentary to last year’s exhibit entitled Innocent Homes, Monika Szwed wrote: “One day I drew a house. A pre-war house with enormous windows.” In her newest works the artist goes inside the house. “Inside there is everything that Frozen Charlie encountered in going from one extreme to the other,” she says. “There is the primitive force of yearning; there is loneliness, expectation, and the path to permafrost through the sands of the desert and mirages. Both the arrival at the Zone (as in Picnic at the Side of the Road by the Strugacki brothers), and the road that takes you there are transformative. It all raises the question as to whether the old Taoist principle – wuwei – which means: do nothing, is correct... I believe in destiny. Frozen Charlie came with his empty hands outstretched and left the same way - that’s what’s human. And snow was falling outside the window.”

 

Szwed’s tasteful and refined art based on her private mythologies is hard to pigeonhole. The artist turns her back on the contemporary life that surrounds her. Her works are rendered and composed with concentration and precision. Her compositions are filled with the refined interiors of pre-war Bauhaus villas with sashed windows and stylish furniture. She fills them with the protagonists of her drawings - children and adults and their complicated relationships, as well as her favorite motifs - mushrooms, children’s toys, and animals. The work of Monika Szwed draws on the one hand from the aesthetic of children’s book illustrations from the 40's and 50's, and on the other can be linked to the ancient art of China.

 

Monika Szwed’s Frozen Charlie exhibit will be accompanied by a one-of-a-kind publication – a limited series of 50 numbered copies of facsimiles of the artist’s work published in the form of an album

 

MONIKA SZWED - Born 17 April 1978 in Poznan. Studied at the Academy of Fine Art Poznan. Graduated with a diploma in Artistic Education under the supervision of Prof. Alicji Kepinska, as well as from the Multimedia Department under the direction of Prof. Piotr Kurka. Winner of the 3rd edition of the MLODA POLSKA scholarship program of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Her work is to be found in private collections in Poland, Germany, the USA and Great Britain.

 

EXHIBITIONS:

2001 “Silesian Exhibition” – Upper Silesian Cultural Center, Katowice

2003 “Art Floor” – Program Gallery, Warsaw

2005 “23 Koans” – Zderzak Gallery, Krakow

2005 ART FORUM BERLIN 2006 Ple-Ple the Witch, TOFTiAK, Torun; Klima Bochenska Gallery, Warsaw

2006 Innocent Homes, Zderzak Gallery, Krakow

2006 ART FORUM BERLIN