MONIKA ZADURSKA-BIELAK born in 1967 in Lublin
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, she lives and works in Lublin. She creates sculptures and runs ceramics and art classes.
In 2011, she established her own workshop (Potok Pracownia Plastyczna), where she organises ceramics and art classes for children and adults. Since 2012, she has been mastering the technique of silicon casting, which she uses to create realistic figures. She is an author of pieces of exhibition sets for numerous Polish museums.
TOMASZ BIELAK born in 1967 in Lublin
In 1995, Bielak graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. He is active in the fields of graphic arts, painting, sculpture, while also being an author of installations and large-scale murals.
In his paintings Bielak combines the craftsmanship of traditional painting with a conceptual approach to art. His realistic figures, objects and animals (monkeys, among others) are set against an abstract neutral background thus emphasising their visual message and symbolical meaning.
The artist regularly creates the so called ArtKwadraty (ArtSquares) – graphic works, which are his artistic and philosophical commentary to the surrounding reality, published in Lubelski Informator Kulturalny magazine and in a weekly edition of Rejsy of the Polish Tri-City-based Dziennik Bałtycki magazine. The pieces often refer to the socio-political situation in Poland in a humorous, ironical tone.
Monika Zadurska-Bielak, Tomasz Bielak, This Is not Wonderland, 2017
Self-portraits of the two artists are made of silicone – a material that reveals each detail of the portrayed faces with incredible precision. The naturalistic images bring to mind wax death masks, which were and still are objects akin to relics, representative fragments of a degraded body, tokens of the adoration of absence. On the other hand, casts of faces locked in a showcase may exemplify curiosities, strange uncommon objects that would be perfectly at home in a contemporary kunstkamera. The work This Is not Wonderland can also be interpreted from a more topical perspective: as portraits of people that reveal all their biological explicitness, tiny defects and the passage of time. The artists chose not to process the casts in order to idealise them, and therefore the objects emanate an air of incompleteness and understatement.
