The propeller is slowly turning. The drawings make an open cycle. Monopol gallery is celebrating its birthday. Each birthday is like a little New Year. Starting Everything Anew Again is the title of an exhibition made of two independent projects.

‘What to do before you die’ is a collection of Zofia Gramz’s drawings that can both make a whole and be admired on their own. Each of them is a little story, but what they all have in common is similar level of absurdity, wriggling about somewhere between ridiculousness and terror, all of them being lavish, ensuring satisfaction and discomfort at the same time.

‘Propeller’ from Paweł Wocial is a slowly rotating propeller in the space filled with light stimulating plant growth. The installation is as technical as it is organic. The slow rotation puts you in a meditative mindset allowing you to grow strong self-awareness.

Zofia depicts in her works all sorts of external influences, factors that make us who we, are and do what we do.

Circumstances that we put ourselves into deliberately or against our will. We are the target of all sorts of commercial offers and guides. More or less consciously we recreate various behavioural models and patterns dictated by the show business, entering the system of mutually related expectations. We bow to public preferences, we try to meet the expectations of both our friends and family and total strangers. We adapt to ruled dictated by economy, and by biology.

Social reality puts a lot of effort into utilising tools of oppression, and into concealing its oppressiveness from us.

And this is when Zofia enters, stressing this very element of the system by turning it inside out. Zofia’s line is as accurate as a one-liner.

The topic of Zofia’s drawings is also the starting point for the ‘Propeller’.

The installation is based on a structure made of beliefs and experience, of everything that can in a close-up be taken for your own identity, but from some distance turns out to be built of external influences, other people’s expectations, patterns shaped by the environment we are in, perceived either explicitly or implicitly. Paweł is interested in changing that state, in generating energy that will allow for taking decisions and for not fearing the change.

Another point of view, distance caused by the change allow for selecting habits, telling your own identity elements from the borrowed ones, leaving all the cultural influences behind, setting yourself free from contexts imposed on you. The new state would be about understanding yourself, and taking control over the situation.

The value is built upon two seeming contradictions, technical and organic, mental and beyond-rational elements. The important common denominator is the creative process that is to some extent rational, but using the brain as a tool than rather being controlled by it.

Both Zofia’s pictures and Paweł’s installations are far from an even most elaborate puzzle. The exhibition is also not the so-called visual essay devoted to one of the season’s hottest topics. It is about something more important. The power coming from the interaction between the exhibited works can turn your current life upside down.

And it will do you good.

Paweł Brylski