A Journey Through Memory, Materiality, and Pop Culture

Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków | 30 January – 13 April 2025

In the heart of Kraków, the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery unveils Elementary Particles, a solo exhibition by Polish artist Marta Antoniak, running from 30 January to 13 April 2025. This expansive showcase, featuring over 60 works, offers a deep dive into Antoniak’s multifaceted practice, where the detritus of the everyday—pop culture motifs, mass-produced objects, and childhood relics—becomes the raw material for a complex interplay of memory, critique, and imagination.

Antoniak’s art absorbs fragments of the real world, blending them into layered compositions that defy easy categorization. Her paintings, installations, drawings, collages, and sculptures weave together the kitsch of pop culture with personal recollection, transforming the mundane into a tool for critical reflection. Drawing from the visual language of comics, animated films, music videos, children’s toys, and teen magazines, she traces the migrations of objects and ideas across physical, cultural, and ideological borders. In her hands, these “elementary particles” become sediments of experience—both intimate and collective—mapping deviations and deformations in form and meaning.

The exhibition spans various stages of Antoniak’s career, presenting a rich selection of spatial installations and paintings, including two new painting cycles created specifically for this show. Among the highlights is Magic Garden, a bespoke spatial installation that encapsulates earlier works, offering a kaleidoscopic reflection of her evolving artistic vocabulary. As curator Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk explains, “The title Elementary Particles operates on multiple levels. Literally, it refers to the small components of Antoniak’s art—objects from her childhood, pop culture shapes, and mass-produced forms. Metaphorically, it evokes primal visual and tactile memories, the first encounters with the material world that shape us.”

Antoniak’s fascination with materiality is palpable. She explores how toys from her youth—seemingly personal artifacts—echo across contexts, slipping through borders in altered guises. “These elements that built the cosmos of my childhood appeared elsewhere too,” she observes, hinting at a broader narrative of migration and transformation. Her work bridges the personal and the universal, inviting viewers to reconsider the objects that surround us as carriers of meaning, memory, and history.

A graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where she also completed her doctoral studies in 2017, Antoniak now serves as an assistant professor at her alma mater. Her career is marked by international residencies, including Jeune Création Européenne in Amarante, Portugal (2010), and Garage Gallery Kralin in Prague, Czech Republic (2018). Her works are held in prestigious collections, such as those of Bunkier Sztuki, the Chancellery of the Polish Parliament, the National Museum in Gdańsk, Galeria Bielska BWA, mBank, and the Nowa Przestrzeń Sztuki Foundation.

Antoniak’s art is a testament to the power of the overlooked—those fleeting, often discarded fragments that shape our lives. In Elementary Particles, she invites us to pause and reconsider the particles that compose our own stories, blending nostalgia with a sharp, contemporary edge. This is an exhibition that lingers, much like the objects it reimagines.