Tate St Ives, Cornwall
With a series of fabric collages, the artist pays tender, nuanced and beautifully realised homage to the Roma of Czarna Góra and the suffering they endured

The wider world woke up to Małgorzata Mirga-Tas at the 2022 Venice Biennale, when the Polish artist became the first Romani to represent a country at the international art festival. Stitched from domestic textiles – old clothes, rugs, patterned bedsheets and curtains – Mirga-Tas’s maximalist presentation transformed the Polish pavilion with pictorial panels that blended art history, mythology and astrology with images of her Roma community in Czarna Góra. It was one of those rare instances when an un-hyped artist burst on to the scene with bold, fresh, transporting work. She is deservedly now much in demand.

Blending art and activism, Mirga-Tas uses her growing visibility to honour Roma lives and in particular those of Roma women. The striking final gallery at Tate St Ives carries six portraits from the series Siukar Manusia (“Wonderful People”) in which stitched and painted figures are set against sombre indigo backdrops. Many are survivors of the Holocaust during which an enormous proportion of Europe’s Romani population was killed. The dapper violinist Augustyn Gabor is pictured with his young daughter on his lap and a cat curled beneath his seat. Krystyna Gil, who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp as a child and went on to found an association for Romani women, appears at an advanced age, her face lined with care, seated in a bright floral skirt beneath a frilly standard lamp.