Małgorzata Mirga-Tas review – vivid, joyful stitchings from the Pole who shook Venice | Art

The wider world woke as much as Małgorzata Mirga-Tas on the 2022 Venice Biennale, when the Polish artist grew to become the primary Romani to symbolize a rustic on the worldwide artwork pageant. Stitched from home textiles – outdated garments, rugs, patterned bedsheets and curtains – Mirga-Tas’s maximalist presentation remodeled the Polish pavilion with pictorial panels that blended artwork historical past, mythology and astrology with pictures of her Roma neighborhood in Czarna Góra. It was a type of uncommon situations when an un-hyped artist burst on to the scene with daring, recent, transporting work. She is deservedly now a lot in demand.

Mixing artwork and activism, Mirga-Tas makes use of her rising visibility to honour Roma lives and specifically these of Roma girls. The putting closing gallery at Tate St Ives carries six portraits from the sequence Siukar Manusia (“Fantastic Folks”) by which stitched and painted figures are set towards sombre indigo backdrops. Many are survivors of the Holocaust throughout which an unlimited proportion of Europe’s Romani inhabitants was killed. The dapper violinist Augustyn Gabor is pictured together with his younger daughter on his lap and a cat curled beneath his seat. Krystyna Gil, who survived imprisonment in a focus camp as a toddler and went on to discovered an affiliation for Romani girls, seems at a sophisticated age, her face lined with care, seated in a shiny floral skirt beneath a frilly commonplace lamp.

Her topics are weighty – many had lives of nice struggling and hardship – however there’s irresistible pleasure in Mirga-Tas’s dealing with of supplies. Whereas the faces and fingers are painted on to canvas, their garments and furnishings are stitched from patterned material and ornamental trimmings. Actual buttons bristle from the entrance of Marian Gil’s shirt; Krystyna Gil’s lampshade is trimmed with a tasselled fringe. Most fantastic of all, the bunch of flowers held by Anna Gil seems to have been caught by a gust of wind, which carries fragments of petals throughout her physique and that of her delightfully portly husband, Jan. These should not works of commemoration however of celebration.

Mirga-Tas’s playful use of textiles embody stitched figures seated on actual crumpled rugs, or carrying fringed shawls that path off the sting of an image. She creates extravagant necklaces from sparkly trimmings. A 3-panel display screen carries a portrait of her mom seated on a plastic chair surrounded by pleasant chickens together with her glittering purple slippers on the bottom beside her. Stroll round to the again of the display screen and also you get the reverse view, full with zip.

The freestanding screens occupy the one vibrant room within the present and really feel richer for his or her deep ultramarine backdrop. It is a a lot much less maximalist affair than the Venice show Re-Enchanting the World: most works are hung remoted towards white partitions. This locations intent give attention to every textile collage, permitting for an in depth studying relatively than an amazing spectacle, however one thing is misplaced by way of vibe. This isn’t merely an aesthetic matter, however a political one. Mirga-Tas typically works with historic supply imagery that perpetuates stereotypes about Romani folks – work and prints that painting anonymous unique beauties, nomadic ne’er do wells, tinkers or musicians. She makes these pictures her personal by way of using vivid color and sample. A white wall isn’t a impartial floor.

The grand again wall of the gallery replicates among the subversive grandeur of the Venice presentation, with the June panel from Re-Enchanting the World flanked by two monumental new works, every re-imagining historic imagery romanticising Roma girls. On the centre of June is a jaunty lobster, marking the astrological image for Most cancers. Above it’s a stereotypical scene of a historic Roma camp with meals cooking over an open hearth. Under it, a bunch of latest girls hang around laundry. On the monumental panel to the left, Mirga-Tas has remodeled the anonymous woman carrying a toddler right into a Roma Madonna.

Naming is vital. A lot of her material collages reimagine pictures from Les Bohémiens (1621–31) – a portfolio of in style prints by Jacques Callot. Not one of the historic art work Mirga-Tas works from are by Roma artists, and none presents named characters: all, to a better or lesser diploma, are fantastical, falling into storybook stereotypes.

A part of Mirga-Tas’s mission is to current an alternate historical past and iconography for Europe’s Roma populations. Two portraits right here, commissioned for a museum in Seville, present the celebrated flamenco performers Juana Vargas de las Heras and Herminia Borja mid efficiency and magisterial. Even in her extra intimate footage, every determine is rooted in actual life, proper right down to the textiles sliced as much as gown them, which are sometimes donated by Mirga-Tas’s neighborhood. Textiles right here bind household to historical past, invite us to recognise our frequent life experiences, and join throughout scraps of sprigged bedsheets, reclaimed buttons and the trim on a pair of slippers.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is at Tate St Ives, Cornwall till 5 January 2025.