Mirella von Chrupek’s project, Romance au chocolat, is your entry into a cocoa-scented dreamscape. Five display cases. Five stories. One sweet chocolate universe. Each one tells its own story, yet they are all tied together by a single motif: chocolate, appearing in different shapes, roles and fantasies. Sometimes chocolate forms the very landscape itself; other times it becomes the hero of the scene – a precious artefact, a symbolic centerpiece, or even an almost human character.
Known for crafting poetic micro-realities, Mirella has this time built her dioramas to spark imagination across many moods: adventurous, romantic, fairytale-like, salon-inspired and futuristic. Each scene, crafted with Mirella’s signature subtle humour, glows with joy and lightness.
The presentation of the exhibition at the Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery positions the artist’s works within a broader artistic context, challenging the traditional division between high and popular culture. Mirella von Chrupek transforms the gallery’s mezzanine space into a setting for an ironic play on the aesthetic category of sweetness, treated here in a sensual and literal manner. These humorous scenes thus constitute a fascinating study of contemporary camp aesthetics and a sophisticated tool for artistic criticism.
Mirella von Chrupek
A visual artist, photographer and diorama designer. Her range of activities also includes set design and small-scale sculpture. In her recent digital photomontages, she makes use of archival photographs. She creates visions of alternative spaces straddling the boundary between fantasy and reality, focusing on human faces and subjecting them to transformation. Between 2014 and 2017, she ran the Gablotka street gallery, located in the centre of Warsaw, where she presented thirteen installations. Together with Sylwia Chutnik, she published the book *Dino Bambino* (Wytwórnia, 2018) about the adventures of the characters featured in successive instalments of *Gablotka*. Since 2017, she has been a regular contributor to the magazine *Kosmos dla Dziewczynek*, where she writes a regular column entitled ‘Mirella’s Microcosm’. She has exhibited her work – both two- and three-dimensional – at venues including BWA Tarnów, Gallery WM in Amsterdam, ABC Gallery in Poznań, CSW Łaźnia in Gdańsk, BWA Wrocław, the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, the Regional Museum in Konin and the Institute of Design in Kielce. She is a scholarship holder of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. A tennis enthusiast. She lives and works in Warsaw.
