Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka was born in Parczew, Poland in 1976. She gained Masters degrees in Art Criticism and in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts (1996–2002) and a PhD in Art History at the Adam Mickiewicz University (2004–08), both in Poznań. Having moved to London in 2015 to begin research at the Slade School of Fine Art, Dawidek has since held several exhibitions and residencies in England that explore the relationship between migration, illness and the body.
Artist, researcher and curator, Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka was born in Parczew, Poland on 13 July 1976. She attended the Secondary School of Art in Lublin, where she studied design and art craft between 1991and 1996, after which she moved to Poznań where she gained her MA in Art Criticism and Promotion at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1996 and 2001, followed by another MA in Painting between 1997 and 2002. Dawidek then earned her PhD in Art History from the Institute of Art History at the Adam Mickiewicz University, also in Poznań, between 2004 and 2008. Her thesis was published in Poland as History of the Visual Text. Poland After 1967, which was awarded the National Centre of Culture in Poland Prize in 2010. At this time, she became Assistant Professor at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań. As well as art critic and historian, Dawidek established herself as an artist in Poland, receiving multiple grants, including from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in 2002 and 2010. She exhibited her Fold-Ups at Wrocłow Contemporary Museum in 2011, comprised of 40 white cubes branded with letters of the alphabet belonging to the languages spoken in the European Union.
In 2014 Dawidek held her first artist's residency abroad at the Art House, Wakefield, Yorkshire in England. There, she worked with women migrants, asylum seekers and refugees to create animations and text-based graphics for the exhibition Topography of Intimacy, in which she described how the ‘process of collaborative work with our bodies, stories and creative writing focused on experiences of our migrations was both painful and fascinating’ (Artwalk Wakefield: Małgorzata Dawidek Q &A). In 2015 Dawidek moved to London more permanently to conduct research at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL), focussing on her practice-led research, The Body as a Text. Emerging as a practicing artist in England, Dawidek held another residency at Centrala Space in Birmingham the year she of her migration. Entitled Conversio, the resulting exhibition continued to explore the experiences of migrant women, producing ‘a riot of kaleidoscopic forms and morphing body parts set to a mish-mashed soundtrack of women’s voices recounting their stories, some original and accented, some translated’ (Haimes, 2015). Her work for Conversio, like her earlier Topography of Intimacy, directly engaged with her developing research at UCL. Centred around the concept of Bodygraphy (coined earlier by Dawidek in 2005), a frequent motif in Dawidek’s works is a merging of body and text through ‘a record of the body, the-body-writing or a writing-through-the-body’ (Artwalk Wakefield: Małgorzata Dawidek Q &A). This is found in her explorations of the sick body in her Body Texts works between 2016 and 2018; the body in pain in her ongoing (Self)Soothing series from 2015; and the body coping with pain in her Book of Hours from 2019.
In August 2018 Dawidek’s exploration of the body in relation to migration, space, place and illness, continued in a month-long research and development residency at Visual Arts in Rural Communities (VARC), Highgreen, in rural Northumberland. Having previously been concerned with the body in relation to urban indoor space, at VARC she considered the body’s response to locations in the rural landscape for the first time. There, she engaged in lone performances which explored her own body within a rural space, documented with videos and photographs. The residency resulted in a final exhibition at VARC’s The Old Stable Gallery and was entitled Foreign Body.
In addition to exhibiting, Dawidek shares her research in public, conference and gallery talks. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2016, and was the recipient of the Signature Art Prize for Photography in 2020. Between 2021 and 2022 she exhibited in the group show Word as Art. Beauty in the Margins at UCL, and A Net of Emotions at ArtWalk Wakefield. Małgorzata Dawidek lives, works and studies in London, England. Her work is not currently represented in UK public collections.