Far Away From Here

The exhibition brings together two painters for whom painting is a way of expressing personal experience that becomes, through telling, a shared history.

Zofia nierodzińska draws on the 1971 strike of the Łódź textile workers and the hunger march that followed a decade later, setting these emancipatory events against her own biography as a second-generation migrant working in the West. In other paintings, she turns to the figure of her father, who emigrated to the US in the 1980s to work — despite having a degree from Poland — as an unskilled construction worker without social security. Physical labor, migration, and precarious employment shaped the lives of most people before, during, and after the political transformation, though after the 1990s the experience of precarity disappeared from official discourse, dominated instead by the mythology of individual success.

Patryk Różycki focuses on personal experiences, emotions, and sometimes fantasies about past events — the history of his own family and immediate surroundings. Like nierodzińska, his autobiographical works deal with the subject of labor, especially precarious, physical work.

Both artists return to the same motifs: work, family, relationships between people, and a sense of disappointment with the reality their families — and they themselves — ended up in. A second important theme for both is migration: migration for work, political migration, migration as a process of changing one's place of residence, sometimes forced, sometimes chosen, driven by the search for a better life.

Did the changes written into their biographies, and the biographies of those close to them, meet the expectations placed in them? And what if they didn't?
nierodzińska and Różycki recall the fates of those who were not lifted by the wind of change.