Painting Workshop with Sylwia Walczowska

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites you to painting workshops for adults. Every day, we experience many tensions, oppressions, and conflicts. We observe political and social events from various perspectives, and we also grapple with our own fears and limitations. When we feel we’ve reached a dead end, it is our imagination that can become a powerful tool for regaining our full agency.

During our meeting, we will explore the potential of imagination as a powerful creative and critical tool. To this end, we will seek inspiration at the exhibition “You Are at the Heart of Change: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism.”

We’ll invite you to identify a specific problem, tension, or situation toward which you feel an inner resistance. Then, together, we’ll subject these challenges to transformation. To do this, we’ll use tried-and-true surrealist strategies: bold distortion, absurdity, and humor. We’ll draw on newspaper clippings, our own photographs, and drawings to create sketches for paintings that will completely transform their original meaning. Your paintings will become an attempt to transform reality, express rebellion, and gain a healthy distance from the phenomena that overwhelm us.

5:00 p.m. – We’ll get to know each other and introduce the workshop’s theme.
5:15 p.m. – We’ll begin preparations: we’ll gather ideas and materials and create our first sketches.
5:45 PM – We’ll move on to the actual work on canvas, with the facilitator’s support throughout.
7:45 PM – We’ll conclude the session with a group reflection, discuss our work, and summarize our activities.

Sylwia Walczowska – visual artist, born in 1990 in Krzeszowice. A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In her work, she focuses on painting, creates spatial forms, and designs tattoos. She is an educator and the initiator of numerous collective projects and spaces (such as Organizm Wspólny, Jednostka twórcza, matka, and Istota Pracownia). In her artistic practice, she explores themes of stages and cyclicality. She frequently draws on her immediate surroundings and thoroughly analyzes their individual elements.