Artist-to-Artist: Magda Stawarska Selected by Lubaina Himid

At Frieze London 2024, Magda Stawarska is showcasing an immersive installation that includes paintings, silkscreen-printed wallpaper and piccolo projections. The viewer is invited to look through a gap in a door on a European street into abandoned and hidden interior spaces, bathed in light from fractured openings that are impossible to reach. Vast facades are enveloped, enclosed, softened and disguised within voluptuous folds of billowing netting, while patterned wallpaper evokes a private interior world. Building on her own approach to exploring cities – allowing herself to get lost, then find herself – Stawarska fashions a personal relationship to place through the layering of histories of memory and movement. 

Lubaina Himid, who selected Stawarska for Artist-to-Artist 2024, explained her choice: 

‘What I admire about Magda Stawarska’s work is the multiplicity of layered imaginings with which she reveals and revives the abandoned histories of place. In some projects, through a delicate handling of ink, paper, paint and linen, the opacity, viscosity and luminosity play with her nameless and mysterious colour palette. In other works, there is a hypnotic dance between voice and cityscape, music and archive. The complex patterns, private codes, surprising translations and historical cross references ever present across her practice, always unfold rather than obscure; in every sense the act of listening to silence and hearing everything is made possible.’

About Magda Stawarska

Born in Poland in 1976, Magda Stawarska’s multi-disciplinary practice combines moving image, sound, silkscreen prints and painting. She recently exhibited at SAF, Sharjah; HOME, Manchester; Villa Arson, Nice; and Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven. Her work is in public collections including the Arts Council Collection, London. She lives and works in Preston, UK.

Magda Stawarska is showing with Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix at Frieze London 2024.

Further Information

Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2024, The Regent’s Park, 9 – 13 October 2024.

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^{Main image: Magda Stawarska, Shimmering Moment (detail), 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix. Photo: Magda Stawarska}