The wider world woke up to Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at the 2022 Venice Biennale, when the Polish artist became the first Romani to represent a country at the international art festival. Stitched from domestic textiles – old clothes, rugs, patterned bedsheets and curtains – Mirga-Tas’s maximalist presentation transformed the Polish pavilion with pictorial panels that blended art history, mythology and astrology with images of her Roma community in Czarna Góra. It was one of those rare instances when an un-hyped artist burst on to the scene with bold, fresh, transporting work. She is deservedly now much in demand.
Blending art and activism, Mirga-Tas uses her growing visibility to honour Roma lives and in particular those of Roma women. The striking final gallery at Tate St Ives carries six portraits from the series Siukar Manusia (“Wonderful People”) in which stitched and painted figures are set against sombre indigo backdrops. Many are survivors of the Holocaust during which an enormous proportion of Europe’s Romani population was killed. The dapper violinist Augustyn Gabor is pictured with his young daughter on his lap and a cat curled beneath his seat. Krystyna Gil, who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp as a child and went on to found an association for Romani women, appears at an advanced age, her face lined with care, seated in a bright floral skirt beneath a frilly standard lamp.
Her subjects are weighty – many had lives of great suffering and hardship – but there is irresistible joy in Mirga-Tas’s handling of materials. While the faces and hands are painted on to canvas, their clothes and furnishings are stitched from patterned fabric and decorative trimmings. Real buttons bristle from the front of Marian Gil’s shirt; Krystyna Gil’s lampshade is trimmed with a tasselled fringe. Most wonderful of all, the bunch of flowers held by Anna Gil appears to have been caught by a gust of wind, which carries fragments of petals across her body and that of her delightfully portly husband, Jan. These are not works of commemoration but of celebration.
Mirga-Tas’s playful use of textiles include stitched figures seated on real crumpled rugs, or carrying fringed shawls that trail off the edge of a picture. She creates extravagant necklaces from sparkly trimmings. A three-panel screen carries a portrait of her mother seated on a plastic chair surrounded by friendly chickens with her glittering purple slippers on the ground beside her. Walk around to the back of the screen and you get the reverse view, complete with zip.
The freestanding screens occupy the only colourful room in the show and feel richer for their deep ultramarine backdrop. This is a much less maximalist affair than the Venice display Re-Enchanting the World: most works are hung isolated against white walls. This places intent focus on each textile collage, allowing for a close reading rather than an overwhelming spectacle, but something is lost in terms of vibe. This is not simply an aesthetic matter, but a political one. Mirga-Tas often works with historic source imagery that perpetuates stereotypes about Romani people – paintings and prints that portray nameless exotic beauties, nomadic ne’er do wells, tinkers or musicians. She makes these images her own through the use of vivid colour and pattern. A white wall is not a neutral surface.
The grand back wall of the gallery replicates some of the subversive grandeur of the Venice presentation, with the June panel from Re-Enchanting the World flanked by two enormous new works, each re-imagining historical imagery romanticising Roma women. At the centre of June is a jaunty lobster, marking the astrological symbol for Cancer. Above it is a stereotypical scene of a historic Roma camp with food cooking over an open fire. Below it, a group of contemporary women hang out laundry. On the monumental panel to the left, Mirga-Tas has transformed the nameless girl carrying a child into a Roma Madonna.
Naming is important. A number of her fabric collages reimagine images from Les Bohémiens (1621–31) – a portfolio of popular prints by Jacques Callot. None of the historic artwork Mirga-Tas works from are by Roma artists, and none presents named characters: all, to a greater or lesser degree, are fantastical, falling into storybook stereotypes.
Part of Mirga-Tas’s mission is to present an alternative history and iconography for Europe’s Roma populations. Two portraits here, commissioned for a museum in Seville, show the celebrated flamenco performers Juana Vargas de las Heras and Herminia Borja mid performance and magisterial. Even in her more intimate pictures, each figure is rooted in real life, right down to the textiles sliced up to dress them, which are often donated by Mirga-Tas’s community. Textiles here bind family to history, invite us to recognise our common life experiences, and connect across scraps of sprigged bedsheets, reclaimed buttons and the trim on a pair of slippers.
• Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is at Tate St Ives, Cornwall until 5 January 2025.
