Małgorzata Dawidek is a Polish visual artist and researcher. She graduated in Painting (2001) and Art Theory and Criticism (2002) from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland. She also studied Photography in Milota Havránková’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia (2000). She holds PhDs in Art History from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2009) and in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art University College London (2024).
Dawidek has developed her creative and academic practice from a cross-fertilisation of disciplines, including literature, anthropology, archaeology, selected aspects of philosophy and humanistic medicine. Her work is based on historical research and archival materials, which inform her photographs, drawings, installations, texts and performances. Studying museum collections, artefacts, maps, and medieval manuscripts, the artist analyses the narratives, politics and imagination of the human body and the ethics and aesthetics of the iconography of vulnerability. Exploring the techniques of working with her own body, language and environment, she poses questions about the ways of depicting illness, pain, anxiety and loss; reviews the canons of representations of the diverse bodily states accepted in contemporary culture; and develops visual forms of soothing, tenderness, care and thriving. Creating a space for potentiality and positive categories in the area of border experiences, she also elaborates her original concepts of bodygraphy and affective artistic practice.
Dawidek has collaborated with many international art and science institutions, completing projects and commissions and participating in research (including Wrocław Contemporary Museum; European Capital of Culture/Impart; Univerzita Karlova, Prague/Czech Republic; School of Social and Political Studies, University of Glasgow/Scotland; Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art/England) and taking part in artistic residencies (including Hastings Museum and Art Gallery/England; Design Museum, Holon/Israel; VARC, Tarset/England; The Art House Wakefield/England). As an academic lecturer, she taught Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań and Art and Health at the Slade School of Fine Art University College London. She is the author and editor of around 100 articles and books, including the monographs „Pieces of Poetry” (2012) and „History of Visual Text. Poland after 1967 (2012), awarded by the National Centre for Culture for the best PhD thesis in the field of cultural studies in Poland in 2010.
Orchestrating her artistic and research experiences, she reconstructed a sculpture by the Polish conceptual artist Barbara Kozłowska based on her sketch from 1970 in collaboration with the Art Transparent Foundation and RR Architekci (Popowicki Park/Wrocław 2016). She also conceptualised and curated the monumental exhibition WroConcret (Wrocław Contemporary Museum, 2011) and a large-scale exhibition of Stanisław Drożdż’s concrete poetry installed in the urban spaces of Wrocław as part of the European Capital of Culture 2016. In 2022, Dawidek was commissioned to create a light-and-text-based installation, The Glossary of Emotions, for The Art House Wakefield. The work, presented in the centre of the town, took the form of a multilingual dictionary containing names and definitions of emotions that have no equivalents in English. In 2024, she was commissioned by the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art to create a large-scale photographic installation, The Other Shore. The project, based on microscopic and aerial photography and geological, historical and cartographic research, is a visual reconstruction of the past landscapes of the Tees Valley.
Dawidek’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Foksal Gallery (Warsaw), Wrocław Contemporary Museum (Wrocław), Wozownia Gallery (Toruń), Entropia Gallery (Wrocław), Arsenał Gallery (Białystok), The Art House (Wakefield), Centrala Gallery (Birmingham), Old Stable Gallery (Highgreen), among others. Recent group exhibitions include shows at MIMA (Middlesbrough, 2024-2025); York Art Gallery (York, 2024); Hastings Museum and Art Gallery (Hastings, 2022); Art27scotland (Edinburgh, 2022); UCL Library Special Collections (London, 2022); COPYRIGHT (Berlin, 2022); Rondo Sztuki (Katowice, 2022); The Foundry Gallery (London, 2019); National Museum (Poznań, 2019), LoosenArt (Rome, 2018); Shrine Empire Gallery (New Delhi, 2018), The Edge Gallery (Bath 2017); The Jerwood Space (London, 2016); Blue Ash Gallery (Cincinnati, 2016).
Dawidek is the recipient of scholarships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2004-2005), the Young Poland Scholarship (2012), the Minister of Culture and National Heritage (2010, 2012, 2020), the British Federation of Women (2017-2019) and the Goethe-Institut (2025). Her work has been awarded the Signature Art Prize, Artellite, Somerset House/London (2020); the Doctoral School Award at University College London (2022); the Hastings Open Art Prize, Hastings Museum and Art Gallery (2022); and the Coherence Foundation Prize, Bydgoszcz (2023).
Public collections include the Museum of Modern Art in Hünfeld, Germany; Aveiro City Museum, Portugal; King’s College Hospital Art Collection, London, England; The Art House Wakefield, England; Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Poland; and the Special Collection of the LiBerature Reading Room at the Jagiellonian University Library in Kraków, Poland.
