Nan Ke Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming group exhibition On Set, opening on August 2. Since Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer introduced the concept of the "Culture Industry" in Dialectic of Enlightenment, film production has often been understood as a form of assembly-line manufacturing.
In the exhibition On Set, artist Helena Minginowicz constructs a series of visually suspenseful “character portraits” that hover between reality and perception, using a visual language rich in hallucinatory quality and psychological tension. Born in 1984 in Poznań, she graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts in Poznań, where she continues to live and work.
Installation view of On Set, August 2, 2025 - Sept 14, 2025, Nan Ke Gallery, Shanghai © Courtesy of Nan Ke Gallery.
In recent years, Minginowicz has gained increasing recognition in the international art scene. Her works have been presented at major contemporary art venues such as Hesse Flatow in New York, Shoreditch Modern in London, AA29 in Madrid, Art Brussels, and Prima Galerie in Paris. She has been featured in leading art publications including Hi-Fructose, Numero, Glamcult, METAL, and WE PRESENT by WeTransfer. In 2023, she was selected as a finalist for the 16th Bielska Jesień Biennial, and in 2025 she will participate in prominent exhibitions at CSW Toruń Center of Contemporary Art, Lotna Gallery, and La Panarteria in Spain.
Helena Minginowicz
Lovers, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
150h x 120w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
Minginowicz’s artistic practice consistently revolves around the “hallucination of reality” and the multiplicity of human relationships. Drawing from daily life, she observes the nuanced states people experience—between intimacy and detachment, fragility and resilience—and renders them through airbrush techniques that create delicately contoured, smoothly gradated images. Her compositions, while reminiscent of advertisements, animations, or dream fragments, are infused with latent emotional tension beneath their composed surfaces. Painting becomes a means of traversing the border between art and consumer culture, with the “filter effect” of vision itself transformed into a conceptual device that prompts viewers to reflect on perception and psychological projection.
Helena Minginowicz
Incompetence, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
60h x 60w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
In On Set, the images Minginowicz presents resemble not only “unselected roles” but also visual sketches from an unfinished script—figures and objects caught in a moment of suspension, awaiting activation. Her subjects often arise from incidental visual encounters: tissues, plastic bags, disposable masks, or low-quality packaging printed with cartoon motifs are granted subtle dignity and narrative weight in her paintings. Materials typically labeled as “fragile” or “disposable” are reinterpreted as quiet critiques of everyday aesthetics and social structure—simultaneously nostalgic and acutely attuned to the present.
Helena Minginowicz
Still Life with Heart Attack, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
100h x 100w cm
© Courtesy of the artist
She is particularly interested in “overlooked beauty,” bringing marginalized visuals and objects from fast-paced daily life into a space of renewed contemplation. Whether fruit stickers, kitschy decorative patterns, or printing errors featuring awkwardly drawn animals, these become vessels for expressing vulnerability, intimacy, and instability. Minginowicz’s sensitivity to “error aesthetics” endows her paintings with a unique sense of intimate estrangement, akin to the presence of background actors—extras on a film set—who are not yet in focus but already embedded in the unfolding narrative.
Within the overarching narrative of On Set, Minginowicz’s paintings act as micro-interventions into the workings of the image factory. Through dislocated color, blurred forms, and strange, exaggerated details, she disrupts our expectations of standard visual grammar. The “unfinished” quality of her imagery becomes a performative gesture laced with philosophical reflection. Her works remind us that images are not merely tools for passive documentation, but cross-sections of emotion, experience, and cultural coding. The “set” she creates is precisely this ephemeral mental space—where complex relationships momentarily surface, then dissolve again.
August 1, 2025
