Majka Sochaniewicz. I like her painting...

  "Majka Sochaniewicz. I like her painting and this is the reason why I am writing this introduction to her catalog. In fact I should have married her long ago, but now we are both past such nonsense - she paints, I write introductions.

  Delicate Mary and her cycle of hard solid pictures. The variety of women she paints. This lack of consistency is only superficial, in fact there is a very feminine consistency underlying all her painting. An original, overdrawn style bordering on the primitive and caricature. And what seems obvious to me is her conscious departure from the primitive, although at first reading we detect here a strong affinity to glass painting.

  Of major importance here is the background. The artist does not use a normal perspective, her perspective is imposed by certain hierarchies, some imperative values. And the foreground, those overdrawn pictures of women, seem to be a series of self - portraits. The same person created ever a new by her environment, shown a various cultural contexts.

  The excellent brothel scenes. For it is the environment that forms women and not only those from the canvasses of Majka..."

Andrzej Pastuszek
Introduction for catalog for exhibition in Nowy Swiat Gallery, Warsaw, 1980 (excerpt)

Retrospective Show I

Looking at her paintings, we have a feeling of facing universal order, primary and primitive in its nature, pagan in a way, where the same spiritual element exist in a plant, an animal and a human being, and the half divine element is equally hard to extract from the human nature as it is hard to draw a line between what is part of humans, plants and animals. Therefore, the photographs Maja Sochaniewicz included in this catalog cannot be viewed just as a poetic joke, but also as camouflaged sort of artistic credo.

Kinga Kawalerowicz
Gallery of Critics, Warsaw, 1984