Helena Minginowicz’s practice explores memory, value and time through painting and sculpture. Working with fragile materials, fragmented images and everyday objects, she considers what we choose to preserve and what we allow to disappear. In our conversation, she reflects on fragility, resilience and the overlooked.
1. Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your practice?
My name is Helena Minginowicz, and I am a visual artist based in Poznań.
In my practice, I explore how images, objects and bodies undergo processes of change, wear and disappearance. I am interested in impermanence and permanence in the context of the human world and human existence, and particularly in the way we assign value to things and experiences while existing within a time that is, by definition, finite.
I am interested in the tension between what we want to preserve and what is inherently impermanent. This is why I work both with traditional painting on canvas and with everyday, disposable materials that are so characteristic of our time - including paper towels, tissues and plastic bags. I place them within the language of art and the collectible object in order to examine how we assign and withdraw value from things, how we decide what deserves to be preserved, and how the value system we have created directly shapes our behaviour, relationships and ways of communicating.
I also think about this on a broader scale: we remember civilisations through their monuments, but we can often understand much more about them through the things they throw away.
Shame - Acrylic on paper towel, 22 x 20 cm, 2026
2. You studied architecture and design before focusing on art. Did this education influence the way you construct your compositions?
Before I went to university to study art, I spent five years at an art school, so I already had a solid artistic education behind me. I had extensive experience with painting, drawing and sculpture, as well as a diploma in art history, which was a compulsory part of that education.
Perhaps that was what created the need to look for different experiences - architecture and design. It was not exactly a perfect fit, but it taught me to think about structure, space, proportion and the relationships between individual elements.
At the art university, however, I was able to choose the balance of my classes to some extent. What developed me the most during those five years were the classes I took in contemporary art and new media.
That was where I learned to approach the manual skills I had developed earlier in a different way. The emphasis on conceptual and intellectual processes at the very beginning of a work gave me something I had been missing before. It helped me structure my way of working and, above all, taught me to ask the right questions.
3. There is a sense of both fragility and resilience in your work. How do these ideas influence what you create?
I don’t see fragility and resilience as opposites. Quite the contrary - I think fragility is often a condition of resilience.
This duality fascinates me, especially because human thinking tends to simplify things in this area, as if we could only possess one of these qualities at a time.
I also think about it through the way we communicate. We expect important declarations to arrive on the appropriate material, preferably engraved in gold letters. We want declarations of love to be expressed through diamonds and gold. The solidity of the material is supposed to give us a sense of certainty. We wait for that certainty - but do we actually receive it?
I wonder how much passes us by simply because we fail to notice things that have not been assigned social or cultural significance - things that lack the expected solidity or splendour.
I don’t treat fragility as an aesthetic quality. Rather, it is a condition through which the work operates. I am interested in the moment when something delicate does not disappear, but begins to function as something enduring.
4. Figures in your paintings are often tightly cropped. Your work for Sound & Vision focuses on a close-up of a face - what draws you to this way of depicting the figure?
A close-up removes a large amount of information - and that is precisely what interests me. We are no longer looking at a complete person or a specific scene, but at a fragment: skin, eyes, hair, a gesture, a surface.
I want my paintings to work somewhat like memory. We are not always immediately certain of what we are seeing. We begin to question the image and our own first recognition of it. Sometimes something comes into focus and sometimes it disappears - like a damaged memory.
This way of cropping creates intimacy, but at the same time it takes away our certainty. I am interested in the moment when an image stops being obvious, when a figure ceases to be an unequivocal representation of a particular person and instead becomes part of a situation that we can no longer fully reconstruct.
Wildfire - Acrylic on Board, 15 x 21 cm, 2026
5. How did the line “Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash / As we fell into the sun” inspire the work you created for Sound & Vision?
I was drawn to the contrast contained in this fragment -something violent and powerful happening at exactly the same moment as something intimate and almost weightless.
“Falling into the sun” also brought to mind the idea of disappearance - the light becomes so intense that the image begins to dissolve. I wanted the work to hold a tension between impact and disappearance, between an experience that overwhelms us and the attempt to hold on to it.
6. What has been occupying your attention lately? Are you currently exploring anything new in your practice?
Recently, I have become increasingly interested in the relationship between painting and the object. I work with disposable materials, particularly paper towels, giving them a more permanent, almost monumental form.
I was drawn to the paper towel precisely because, despite being disposable, it is carefully designed and embossed, while at the same time being made to be thrown away almost immediately. Its delicacy moved me. I thought that whatever appeared on it could easily be ignored simply because of the role we have assigned to it. And yet, to engage with something so subtle and try to preserve it requires an enormous amount of delicacy.
I am interested in the contradiction of transforming something temporary into something that is meant to endure. In a sense, it is an attempt to preserve things that were created to disappear. By turning disposable materials into lasting objects, I create something like fossils or relics of our time. The works on paper towels are, for me, somewhat like mosquitoes trapped in amber - preserving something that was meant to disappear.
At the same time, I continue to explore the figure and the instability of the image - the ways in which an image can fade, fragment or resist a single, definitive reading.
I am also continuously interested in experiences that we often repress or push out of our memories because they are uncomfortable, disappointing or do not fit our expectations: moments of doubt, helplessness, illness, loneliness, disappointment in relationships, but also beautiful, one-off relationships that have no future, or situations in which we simply fail to navigate the social systems we live within.
I am interested in what these “broken” stories tell us about ourselves. I don’t want to repair them or present them as something exceptional. I want to look at what they reveal about a person when they stop fulfilling the expectations they - or society - have placed upon them.
7. Do you have any upcoming projects you can tell us about? What can we expect?
I am currently preparing a solo exhibition at Prima Galerie in Paris, where I will present new paintings alongside works from my recent series.
The exhibition continues my interest in fragility, disappearance and the things we try to preserve. At the same time, I am developing a group of objects made from plexiglass that incorporate everyday materials intended to be thrown away.
I am increasingly interested in thinking about painting not only as an image, but also as a physical object that itself becomes something to be preserved.
Ultimately, I keep returning to the same question: what makes us decide that something should survive?
Visit Helena's Website
Questions by Hettie Shaw
