Biography
Małgorzata Dawidek is a visual artist and art historian. She studied Painting (1996-2001) and Art Criticism (1997-2002) at the Academy of Fine Art in Poznań, Poland. In 2009 she earned her PhD in Art History from the Institute of Art History Department at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. In 2015 the artist started her PhD research at the Slade School of Fine Art / UCL in London.
Małgorzata Dawidek’s artistic practice is focused on a conflict between the human corporeality and discursive language. She studies body's reactions to the environment and reads body as a textual form and repository of individual and group memory. The artist analyses issues related to the awareness, blockages and possibilities of language and body. She is interested in limitations and juxtapositions of both these entities – extreme body states and verbal communication.
In her practice the artist combines various media – text, drawing, painting, photography, video and performance art.
Małgorzata Dawidek is also a researcher of an alternative literature and an author of articles and books on visual texts, including A Piece of Poetry (Kraków 2012) and History of the visual text. Poland after 1967 (Kraków-Wrocław-Warszawa 2012).
She has been awarded the The Pollock-Krasner Foundation artistic grant (2004-2005), the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage grant (2002, 2010) and the Young Poland award (2012). In 2010 she received the National Centre of Culture in Poland Prize for the best PhD dissertation in the field of culture studies. In 2016 Dawidek was nominated to the Jerwood Drawing Prize.
She lives and works in London.
