Frieze Artist-to-Artist 2024: Magda Stawarska Selected by Lubaina Himid.

“I want to evoke the interior world of private life and punctuate it with abstracted architectural flickers suggesting lost moments in old movies; I am always curious about these private moments in the public realm.” – Magda Stawarska

Magda Stawarska, 'Lost Movies I, II, III' (2024). Frieze, London.

Premiering to great acclaim in 2023, the Artist-to-Artist section at Frieze London returned for its second year this week. In support of innovative voices, Lubaina Himid was one of six renowned artists that nominated emerging artists to showcase solo presentations at the Frieze Art Fair. Himid selected Polish multi-disciplinary artist Magda Stawarska who curated an instillation of paintings and piccolo projections connected by silkscreen-printed wallpaper titled ‘Breathe In, Breathe Out’. With a chosen subject matter of “personal relationship to place”, Stawarska explores the human habitat and the endless possibilities of personal histories that could have been created within these spaces.

Lubaina Himid explained why Stawarska’s work resonates with her:

“What I admire about Magda Stawarska’s work is the multiplicity of layered imaginings with which she reveals and revives the abandoned histories of place. In some projects, through a delicate handling of ink, paper, paint, and linen, the opacity, viscosity, and luminosity play with her nameless and mysterious colour palette. In other works, there is a hypnotic dance between voice and cityscape, music, and archive. The complex patterns, private codes, surprising translations, and historical cross references ever present across her practice, always unfold rather than obscure; in every sense the act of listening to silence and hearing everything is made possible.”

Magda Stawarska, 'Slipping Veil, Katowice' (2024). Frieze, London.

This paradox, “the act of listening to silence and hearing everything”, beautifully summarises the viewer’s experience of Stawarska’s works, such as ‘Slipping Veil, Katowice’ (2024). Gazing upon the large-scale paintings of building facades with scaffolding climbing its exterior and the bellowing folds of netting floating in an eerie manner there is a quietness; perhaps you would imagine only the hushed hum of a soft breeze. However, the veil of netting and eighteenth-century style windows evokes an interest in secret, complex behaviours concealed within the undisturbed setting depicted. The paintings seem to consider engendered space, what would usually be a masculine building site instead has a feminine atmosphere; it is delicate, it is quiet, we view it from a place of contemplation.

Stawarska described her process of seeking inspiration as wondering among buildings in the city, allowing herself to become lost and disorientated, photographing the experience. Echoing Guy Debord’s ‘psychogeography’, this method of mapping spaces through instinct, rather than destination-focused travel, offers a more personal and complex understanding of place. The viewer is encouraged to experience a space through the eyes of the street, rather than that of a powerful arial view marketed as the ultimate perspective by capitalism.

A continuation of this motif is a twenty metre long, horizontal piece patterned with screen-printed grids titled ‘Lost Grids/ Whispering Rhythms’ (2024). The patterns of the wallpaper mimic the graphic structure of maps; Stawarska explained that “they are usually rigid and conventional, but as I play with them, pulling, skewing, and overlaying, they lose their functionality and give a sense of being lost.”

Magda Stawarska, 'Lost Grids/ Whispering Rhythms' (2024). Frieze, London.

Layered onto sections of the grids are three piccolo digital projections titled ‘Lost Movies I, II, III’ (2024). Stawarska described the short films:

“I am curious about private moments in the public realm. Three small, close-up, abstracted moving images are captured from a locked camera position. Moving transport, fragments of architecture, quickly pass by; scenes abandoned on the cutting room floor, suggesting lost moments in old movies. These three projections start and stop, creating a rhythmic conversation or a visual song between each other.”

Personal histories expressed through layered patterns of memories create evocative works that encourage viewers to consider the spaces and places we, and others, inhabit. Perhaps it is this consideration of the other, other personal histories, other pathways through spaces, integrated with Stawarska's intuitive wondering that we should take with us as we venture beyond the walls of Frieze Art Fair and back into the busy streets of London.