HELENA MINGINOWICZ

Overview

OPENING THURSDAY 8 OCTOBER 2026 (6PM-9PM)

Following a first acclaimed presentation at Galerie Prima, Polish artist Helena Minginowicz (born in 1984 in Poznań) returns with Out of Order, a new solo exhibition bringing together an entirely new body of paintings on canvas and, for the first time in Paris and France, her delicate works on paper towels. The exhibition focuses on what our representations usually leave out of sight: ordinary gestures, intimacy, vulnerability, the body, and the traces we might sometimes prefer to see disappear.

The exhibition title refers less to disorder itself than to the disruption of an established order. In her notes, Minginowicz points to the way every culture constructs its own hierarchy of values, determining what deserves to be represented, admired and passed on. The history of painting runs throughout Out of Order. References to Italian painting surface in several compositions. Source, with its reclining female body, evokes Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Elsewhere, the quotations are more direct: Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas reappears in Love your neighbor as yourself, while his Boy with a Basket of Fruit resurfaces in Hookupp. In both cases, these canonical images are displaced onto representations of plastic bags, bringing the permanence we grant masterpieces into dialogue with the ordinary, functional and disposable nature of their new support.

These shifts are characteristic of Minginowicz’s practice more broadly. Trained in classical painting, she knows its codes as well as she seeks to unsettle them. Using an airbrush, she constructs her images while deliberately minimizing the visibility of her own gesture. Transparencies, superimpositions, framing and fragments produce familiar scenes in which something nevertheless seems not quite in its proper place. This strangeness can slip into discomfort, humour, or at times even bad taste, a boundary the artist is not afraid to test. For the question of what is worthy of representation is also a question of taste, and therefore of hierarchy. Minginowicz confronts the subjects historically legitimized by painting with intimacy, embarrassment, desire, bodily fluids, ageing and mortality. Her aim is not to replace beauty with ugliness, but to question the very categories that organize the way we look.

“We want to be like canvas, but we are much more like a paper towel, not because we are worth less, but because we are finite.” Helena Minginowicz

It is in the works on paper towels that this reflection takes its most direct form. Designed to absorb, clean and then be discarded, the paper towel takes on a different function and status here. In Heaven, cherubs appear across its embossed surface. In The Kiss, two mouths meet upon it. The sheets are then encased in thick blocks of transparent acrylic which, in the artist’s own words, function as “contemporary reliquaries,” preserving what was originally intended to be used and thrown away.

Disorder perhaps most clearly condenses the principle at work throughout the exhibition. On a torn sheet of paper towel, a seemingly classical portrait is cut horizontally, with the upper and lower parts of the face slightly misaligned. The image is not destroyed; its order is disrupted.

This same displacement runs throughout Out of Order, between classical painting and contemporary visual culture, canvas and disposable material, functional object and artwork to be preserved. Minginowicz thus questions not so much the value of things themselves as the hierarchies that determine what we choose to look at and what we choose to preserve.

Works