Maria Brzozowska: Gardens of Delight
“The reader can hardly conceive my astonishment at the sight of an island in the air.” – Jonathan Swift (1726)
Maria Brzozowska (born 1992) is a secret genius. His work is based on meticulously detailed and exquisitely layered visual narratives, inherited from El Bosco, surrealism and its folkloric satellites. Its visual language offers a magical potpourri or confetti of recurring motifs, such as owls and moths, masks and moons, pigeons and petals. From a tulip to a teapot, its imaginary abodes are inhabited by buffoons, nutcrackers and dancing princesses.
Her latest solo exhibition, Magic in Bloom, invites us on an odyssey of female self-discovery through the multiple levels of her dreamscapes, with images that transform and surprise as she guides us through a series of portals, palaces and elaborate thresholds. As an English-educated Polish painter, who has spent time absorbing Turkey’s cultural heritage and now resides in Germany, her international coordinates bring to her practice a sort of mosaic of references ranging from puppet theatre to picture books.
The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1500), the famous triptych by Flemish painter El Bosco, serves as a backdrop for Brzozowska’s otherworldly domains. This connection is even more relevant this time, given that Magic in Bloom is presented in Madrid, near the Prado Museum. Brzozowska skillfully applies the lessons of El Bosco, in particular his unusual sense of perspective and keen eye for detail, with giant birds, aquatic homunculi and mechanical seed capsules coexisting with human figures fiddling in an infinite variety of visionary scenarios. Here, heaven and hell are equally inspiring destinations, paradises and hells catering to a wide range of desires.
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) offers another landmark for Brzozowska, particularly its floating island of Laputa in the land of Balnibarbi, a fertile place for creative imagination. Swift describes this moving territory as an irrational place where its inhabitants are extremely versed in mathematics and music. Thus, Laputa becomes an ideal site for the enchanted gardens of Brzozowska, as in Seedling’s Dance, where its visual precision gives rise to strange architectures and flowering floral aberrations. His work is a peculiar natural history based on the fantastic.
The castles in the air of Lunaria’s Dream transport us towards the surrealism of the 20th century. As a fairy tale motif, the image of a castle floating in the sky was fixed in the surreal imagination as a wonderful form of celestial navigation. While the leader of the movement, André Breton, awaited his emigration to America during World War II, he wrote an extensive poem entitled Fata Morgana (1940), not as a simple vehicle of escapism, but as a surreal coping mechanism of reality. Mythographer Marina Warner describes the Fata Morgana phenomenon as a “meteorological miracle,” where the evil fairy Morgan Le Fay created appearances of castles in the clouds to lure sailors to their doom.2
The “castle in the sky” is a false image, a mirage or a trompe l’oeil (trampantojo) adopted by surrealism as an illusion that floats on reality, like the child who passes through a magical portal to the world of stories. Works like Mother’s Seed and Marzanna’s Farewell evoke a series of surreal images, such as René Magritte’s Le ch â teau des Pyrénées (1959), with its unexplained granite castle floating in the clouds. She also recalls Surrealist Dorothea Tanning’s admiration for Maxfield Parrish’s illustrations, especially Air Castles (1904), with its ethereal soap bubbles and contemplative atmosphere. Also, Leonora Carrington's magical tapestries and flying vehicles in works such as La Chasse (1942) and Jaws (1942) suggest natural alternatives to mechanical engineering.
Surrealism and fairy tales intertwine in unique ways in Brzozowska’s canvases. His aesthetic is in the tradition of Carrington’s postwar lullabies, as well as illustrated books from his childhood, such as those by Kay Nielsen and Heath Robinson. Carrington's The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot (1946) and Again, the Gemini are in the Orchard (1947) present domestic details, such as a miniature apple tree and a splendid rooster, creating dreamlike landscapes of solace. It would be wise to remember how necessary this imagery is to allow us to dream of meaning in difficult times. Solomon Adler describes Carrington’s walled garden as “a great metaphor for creation.”5 An eyot is a river island, an idea that also resonates in Maria’s miniature dreamscapes. Brzozowska responds with her rose-dyed Garden Spirits, with carefully pruned magenta leaves and costumed triplets, ready for symbolic action.
Max Ernst, with La Joie de Vivre (1936), also anticipates the plant surrealism of Brzozowska in Kingdom of Leaves and Melancholia’s Garden. Ernst celebrated the jungle of the tiny, with monstrous insects, while Brzozowska reversed the scale, transforming flowers into angels and dispelling everyday phobias. Susan Stewart reminds us of our nostalgia for content:
Gulliver’s clumsiness in approaching the Lilliputian world is the clumsiness of the dreamer approaching the dollhouse. All the senses must be reduced to the visual.”6
For a long time, there was a critical reticence towards this type of delicate images, an anxiety for the freedom of the female story. However, literary critic Kate Bernheimer has defended the fairy tale genre:
“Sometimes I hear that the motifs of fairy tales are automatically dismissed as feminist clichés, which is a serious misapprehension of the complex political history of form.”7
Tanning also lamented that his visual narratives were often misinterpreted as “delicate female fantasies ... full of symbols.”[8] Observing Brzozowska’s symbolic repertoire, the withered flower of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) or the hidden angel wing in Moeurs Espagnoles (1943) comes to mind. Surrealism offers Brzozowska an artistic family tree from which to extract multiple sources.
The votive paintings of Frida Kahlo and the alchemical obsessions of Remedios Varo are also present in Brzozowska’s work. Kahlo’s Roots (1943), as Gulliver in Lilliput, intertwines the artist’s body with the landscape. Meanwhile, Varo’s Creation of the Birds (1957) resonates in the winged world of Night Owl’s Lullaby and Floral Alchemist. We also find echoes of Bridget Bate Tichenor and Leonor Fini in the epic theatricality of Venetian Dream.
From the absurd to the bazaar. After Surrealism came the narrative frameworks of Italo Calvino. His novel The Invisible Cities (1972) offers a labyrinthine and touristic experience, a map to explore Nectar City and beyond.
After three days, moving south, you arrive at Anastasia, a city with concentric canals that water it and comets sailing through the sky. Now I should list the commodities that can be bought profitably here: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of chalcedony...sprinkled with abundant sweet marjoram.”9
As in a zodiac, every painting of Brzozowska could be read as one of these mythical metropolises. His work is an exercise in the cultivation of fantasy, a splendid way of visual horticulture and illusory architecture, metamorphosing between desires and provoking the viewer to daydream.
Dra. Catriona McAra
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Colin McKelvie (Belfast: Appletree Press Ltd., 1976), 140.
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford University Press, 2006), 101.
See my ‘Leonora Carrington: Wild Card,’ The Space Between, volume 14 (2018): https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and-culture-1914-1945/vol14 _ 2018 _ mcara Accessed 25 February 2025
Carrington’s technique draws on ‘the golden age’ of children’s picture book illustration, see my ‘Leonora Carrington and Children’s Literature,’ Gramarye: Journal of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, issue 12 (Winter 2017), 36-45. See also, Rodney Engen, The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and Their Contemporary 1890-1930 (London: Scala Publishers Ltd., 2007), 98.
Solomon Adler, ‘Leonora Carrington: The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot,’ SFMoMA (December 2020): https://www.sfmoma.org/essay/leonora-carrington-the-kitchen-garden-on-the-eyot-1946/
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 67.
Kate Bernheimer, ‘This Rapturous Form,’ Marvels and Tales, 20:1 (2006): 82-83.
Dorothea Tanning, Between Lives: An Artist and Her World (London and New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2001), 336.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (London: Vintage, 2023), 10.