South Square is delighted to be hosting an exhibition by Alicja Mrozowska, work to date and explores identity, memory, and cultural hybridity through bold portraiture and playful abstraction.
Alicja Mrozowska’s paintings navigate the layered terrain of identity, memory, and cultural hybridity through bold portraiture and playful abstraction. Rooted in personal history and shaped by the nuances of migration, her work draws from everyday imagery, reconfiguring the familiar to question how place and experience inform who we are. Yorkshire Pudding and Pickled Cabbage marks the most expansive presentation of Mrozowska’s work to date, bringing together paintings from 2017 through to 2025. Combining large gestural brushstrokes with recurring motifs and symbolic references, her compositions balance between the recognisable and the obscure, inviting viewers into a space where identities blur, overlap, and reform. Through a practice grounded in both intuition and process, Mrozowska weaves together collected images - personal, cultural, and imagined - layering them with oil paint and paper to construct portraits that resist singular readings. Her figures emerge not as fixed subjects but as open-ended reflections of internal complexity, shaped as much by social context as by intimate experience. At once serious and light-hearted, the exhibition revels in contradiction, drawing attention to the tensions between surface and depth, play and constraint, self and other. Mrozowska’s work ultimately asks: how do we perform, obscure, or reveal who we are - especially when those performances take place within the structures of cultural expectation? Alicja Mrozowska is a Polish visual artist and painter currently based in Leeds. Her practice explores identity, the concept of ‘home,’ and social constructs through a range of mediums including oil painting, film photography, installation, and construction. Drawing from personal experience, surroundings, and relationships, she reflects on the complexities of migration and belonging. Mrozowska graduated from the University of Salford in 2018 with a BA (Hons) in Visual Art. Since then, she has exhibited widely and taken part in collaborations and group residencies, while also devising and leading creative workshops in the UK, Poland, and Germany. Her process-driven approach weaves together collected images and intuitive mark-making to create narrative-rich, multidimensional works that prompt curiosity, vulnerability, and acceptance
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