Exhibition „Slime” at Warsaw’s Zachęta - National Gallery

For many years, Joanna Fluder worked at home, creating at her kitchen table, while also raising her children. This shaped the sketch like, expressive character of her art, rooted in the recording of dreams, memories, and everyday situations. For the artist, painting has become a form of therapy and resistance against social norms. A vital element of her work is her collaboration with children, whose boundless imagination not only recalls her own childhood in the countryside, but also frees her from rigid ways of thinking.

Joanna Fluder has forged a distinctive visual language that blends surrealism, personal mythology, humour, and vivid imagination. Her work explores themes of women’s daily lives, motherhood, the social dimension of care, neurodiversity, artistic practice, and the relationship with the surrounding environment, including the natural world.

The recurring motifs of insects and snails serve as a metaphor of her experience as an artist, mother, sister, and daughter, as well as of emancipation patterns. The titular slime – the trace left by a snail – becomes a symbol of creative existence, a sign of presence, action, and persistence despite pressure. The snail embodies Fluder’s artistic attitude: a way of sensing the world with the entire body, bearing one’s home upon the back, and following a personal rhythm, free from the dictates of external norms.

Created especially for the Zachęta exhibition, the interactive installation Giantess features a female figure, whose slender silhouette and elongated limbs recall the characteristic women from the artist’s other works. She becomes a landscape, an everyday object, a piece of furniture. The piece recalls intergenerational experiences of women – sadness, subordination, fatigue, and the ingrained duty of service and care.

Inspired by the figure of the artist’s grandmother Józefa, the seven metre tall (!) form is monumental in scale yet marked by passivity and compliance. Visitors can hug her, sit or even lie down on her, nestle into her arms, and comb or tangle her rope like hair. The figure of Giantess was sewn from Verner Coral 37, an exceptionally soft and pleasantly tactile upholstery fabric, which is in line with the installation’s concept of direct interaction.

Floating above the giant figure lying on the floor is a symbolic canopy made of Piuma Silver Gray 10, a delicate, airy, almost transparent curtain fabric. The same decorative fabric reappears in Fluder’s second installation, The Temple of Dormant Vegetation – a spiral, light structure reminiscent of a snail’s shell, intended by the artist to evoke the atmosphere of greenhouses.

As a child, she enjoyed spending time in such places, playing, observing withered vegetables and weeds, and watching the slow wanderings of snails. This time, it is the viewers who can observe compositions of dry branches and papier mâché sculptures, concealed behind a translucent vale, enigmatic beings merging the qualities of plants, insects, and animals. The installation symbolically refers to the period of winter hibernation in nature, a time of regeneration essential for renewed growth.

The exhibition is curated by Michalina Sablik and the display space was crafted by the designers from the Supergirls Do Design studio: Marta Szostek and Matylda Halkowicz. The exhibition stays open until October 19, 2025.
We are happy that our fabrics have become the material for yet another artistic project.

We provided them to Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, one of Poland’s most prestigious and recognisable cultural institutions, as part of our cultural support programme. More details about our initiatives in this domain can be found here.