Three years after our first conversation, Monika Marchewka returns with a body of work that feels as seductive as it is quietly unsettling. In How to be eaten, her new solo exhibition at Artistellar Gallery in London, the Polish artist transforms the visual language of vintage recipe illustrations and theatrical food presentation into something far more psychologically charged.
Her still lifes are lush, nostalgic and inviting, but never entirely stable: beauty starts to curdle, arrangements tip toward excess, and the desire to be welcomed becomes inseparable from the pressure to be pleasing, presentable, and consumable. Moving from the role of host to that of dish, Marchewka uses food, insects, and staged abundance to reflect on hospitality, femininity, performance, and the fragile boundary between being accepted and being consumed. We spoke to her for the second time about appetite, belonging, and the emotional tension simmering beneath the surface of the feast.
Hi Monika, it’s been about 3 years since we last talked. It’s a pleasure to have you back! First off. What have you been up to since then?
Monika: A lot has changed in my personal life since our last conversation. I got married and opened an art studio where I now run art classes for adults. As for my painting practice, the past few years have mostly been about stabilising my own world. After many trials and errors, I’m slowly arriving at what I really want to say and how I want to say it. I’ve also learned how to say no. Not every project is necessary, sometimes they only occupy your mind and bring more stress than meaning. These days I’m much more interested in working calmly and consistently than in doing as much as possible.
Is there anything you were convinced about a year ago — materially, emotionally, or artistically, that you now see differently
Monika: Yes. Not long ago I wanted more of everything: more exhibitions, more paintings, more opportunities to show my work. I had an enormous appetite and felt the urge to satisfy it quickly. But that eventually led to a lot of stress, frustration and moments of self-doubt. It took me quite a long time to regain my balance. Now I try to work more slowly, at my own pace. I allow myself more sketches and more searching. And when something doesn’t work on the canvas the way I imagined, I simply paint over it. There’s no need to rush; the world is already moving fast enough.
You have a solo show coming up at Artistellar Gallery, in London. What was your inspiration behind this new body of work?
Monika: The starting point was the idea of a lavish dinner and everything that surrounds it. I’m fascinated by how much we are willing to do for just a few hours of shared feasting, how much preparation, planning and expectation lies behind what seems like a simple gathering around a table. And yet the whole situation can collapse because of a tiny detail. A bee flying around the table, ants in the dessert, a hair on a plate. You might prepare the most beautiful dish from your childhood exactly the way you remember it, but how can you know that one of your guests won’t find it absolutely terrible? That fragility of the situation interests me a lot. I think about food quite often, about tasting places, cultures and encounters. At the same time, I sometimes feel that we rarely allow ourselves enough time or emotional space to truly celebrate those moments.
“How to be eaten”. What’s the story behind that title?
Actually it was Adele’s idea 😉 She’s amazing!
How to be eaten is striking and slightly unsettling. What does the idea of “being eaten” represent for you in a social or emotional sense?
Monika: Honestly, I would very much prefer not to be eaten or perhaps more precisely, not to let myself be eaten. At the same time, I would still like to remain appealing like a fresh butter bun. It’s a paradox: we want to be attractive to others, but we don’t want to be completely consumed by them. For me, being eaten is a metaphor for losing yourself for someone or something. That’s why it’s so important to find a balance between what we give to others and what we keep for ourselves.
So what sparked the initial idea, what was your inspiration for this new body of work?
Monika: My first thoughts about it appeared during the period of weddings and wedding receptions. Choosing the food suddenly becomes an enormous undertaking — as if the quantity and quality of dishes were meant to demonstrate your social status. And yet everyone is there for an entirely different reason. Later you often realise that huge amounts of food remain untouched. That excess struck me strongly. It’s something deeply connected to the culture I grew up in, and something I’m still trying to step away from, at least emotionally. I’m learning to treat feasting a little less seriously.
And did you do any form of specific research for them?
Monika: I mainly had many conversations about how we perceive the table today and how we remember it from the homes we grew up in. I was interested in how those backgrounds influence the way we approach cooking, eating, or dining out now. I feel that I’ve only barely touched this topic. It’s incredibly complex and fascinating.
The works seem to hover between seduction and discomfort. How important is that tension for you when constructing an image?
Monika: That tension is very important to me. I like to think about it as a kind of seasoning. When you bake brownies, it’s good to add a bit of chilli or salt it makes the sweetness deeper and more interesting. I treat emotional unease in my paintings in the same way. Without it, the image would become too smooth, too bland.
The exhibition touches on the pressure to be “pleasing, presentable, and consumable.” Do you see this as something specific to certain environments, like art, social media, or relationship, or something more universal?
Monika: For most of my life I felt that this was generally expected from me as a woman to be pleasant, presentable and easy to accept. Things are slowly changing now, but that expectation hasn’t completely disappeared. I think many people still recognise it in different forms.
You reference vintage recipe illustrations and theatrical food displays. What drew you to that visual language, and what kind of cultural memory do those images carry for you?
Monika: As a child I loved browsing through cooking magazines that my mother used to buy. I remember dreaming that one day I would prepare a table that looked exactly like the ones in those photographs. Recently I managed to find those magazines again mostly from the 1990s. Their aesthetic feels quite distant from today’s idea of elegance, but they still carry a certain charm. For me they hold a kind of cultural memory, slightly naive perhaps, but also very warm.
Ants and bees appear as recurring figures in the exhibition. What role do they play in the narrative of the works?
Monika: I’m actually very afraid of bees and wasps, even though I’ve never been stung before. Every summer gathering around a table carries a small fear that I might accidentally drink something with an insect inside, or that trying to push it away will end in a painful sting. For me, this is simply the price of having a beautiful outdoor dinner. You have to accept that there will always be a few additional guests.
They introduce time and decay into otherwise staged compositions. Were you interested in disrupting the perfection of the still life format?
Monika: Yes, definitely. But I wasn’t so interested in traditional ideas of transience. What fascinates me more is the moment of a small mistake within even the most carefully planned feast. Slightly unripe fruit, something already bitten into, an imperfection that can no longer be corrected. Sometimes it’s simply too late to search for better ingredients. You have to serve what is already on the table and hope that your guests will focus on the main dish.
The exhibition also speaks about belonging and the desire to be accepted. Is that something rooted in personal experience?
Monika: Of course, but I also believe it’s a very universal feeling. Everyone wants to belong somewhere. The difficulty is that groups often turn out to be only a stage in our lives. Even the most abundant feast eventually comes to an end. And then we either start looking for the next one, or try to create our own and hope that others will want to join us.
When does hospitality become a form of performance rather than care?
Monika: For me, care begins with a very simple question: are you hungry? Everything that happens afterwards becomes, to some extent, a performance smaller or bigger depending on what I happen to have in my fridge. If there isn’t much there, you can be sure you’ll receive a sandwich decorated with a drawing made from ketchup.
Your compositions feel very staged, almost theatrical. What does the process of building one of these scenes look like in practice?
Monika: I start by looking at a large number of images mostly from old cooking magazines and guides. When I begin a painting, I usually start with the element that feels most important to me. Then I gradually add more objects around it, building the scene step by step. Inventing these arrangements is actually one of the most enjoyable parts of the process.
There’s something slightly cannibalistic in the idea of being consumed by the spaces or communities we want to belong to. Do you see the exhibition as a critique of that dynamic?
Monika: It wasn’t my intention to create a direct critique, although these thoughts certainly accompanied me while working. I’m very curious how viewers will respond to the work, whether they will notice these subtle “flavour notes” within the paintings and whether the dish I’m serving will provoke conversations.
After making this body of work, do you feel like you understand something new about the relationship between attention, affection, and appetite?
Monika: I think I’ve realised even more clearly how closely these things are intertwined. Attention, affection and appetite follow similar rhythms: they attract us, nourish us, but they can also easily overwhelm us. It’s a delicate balance that I’m still learning.
Ok Monika, last question… Do you feel better understood today than you did 3 years ago? And if so, is that something you actually want?
Monika: My work reaches a much larger audience today than it did three years ago, which naturally increases the chance that someone will truly understand it. I really enjoy reading interpretations of my paintings. It’s especially moving when someone explains the work to others and happens to touch exactly the point I had in mind. I’ve always dreamed of my work generating conversations. Something like a long table where people gather, talk, eat, and stay a little longer. That feels very close to the kind of artistic feast I would like to create.