2025
textile

In her diptych Fundamental Values, the artist connects two concepts of essential importance – bread and truth – with the aesthetics of luxury brands. She transforms them into products, integrating them into the language of global desire and commercial prestige.

Bread, a metaphor for everyday survival, is elevated to the status of a premium good, just as truth becomes a tool of manipulation and image-making within the media and political spheres.

The placement of the works in a newly built residential building gives them an additional layer of meaning – revealing the relationship between symbolic and market value, and the paradox of art which, while criticising market mechanisms, simultaneously becomes part of them.

MONIKA DROŻYŃSKA is an embroiderer, visual artist, Doctor of Arts and activist. She graduated from the Faculty of Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków and received the 2024 Polityka Passport award. She was sentenced for embroidering on train headrests in Polish State Railways carriages. Drożyńska is a pioneer of embroidery techniques in contemporary art and of textile in public space. She has collaborated with many established institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Wrocław, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, NOMUS in Gdańsk and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Her works are held in public collections in Poland and abroad.