Review: Kasia Muzyka
- Jul 15
- 6 min read
Kasia Muzyka: Mystic and Her Sacred Way of Being
By Chunbum Park
New York, NY
2025-07-15
Kasia Muzyka’s solo exhibition titled, “The Sacred Condition of Being,” in Chelsea explores the philosophy of existence and cosmology through a mystical lens. The Polish-American artist produced the mixed media paintings, consisting of wine, coffee, tempera, and acrylic skin as key ingredients, out of the spiritual necessity to change the dominant paradigms of our time. “The Sacred Condition of Being” is not a conceptual project but a lived unveiling. According to the artist, each painting emerges not from planning but from surrender. The works are layered transmissions shaped by mysticism, memory, and a desire to return to the original rhythm of existence, before names and before judgment. Muzyka does not reject science, symbolism, or metaphysical language—but resists reduction. Her work invites a broader view: one that honors multiple ways of knowing without needing to define any as the singular truth; rather the artist prefers an expansive understanding of her work as one that deals with the question of what it means to be whole while still becoming, to feel life at its most subtle frequency, and to the process and the nature of creativity from such a place.
The question that the artist deals with is very introspective, requiring courage, strength, vulnerability, and self-reflection. Mother Earth is ailing, and this is a reflection of our own collective suffering. But to acknowledge the suffering is a step forward to fix it, and therefore the qualities of innocence and vulnerability are not weaknesses as our culture makes us believe. What is strength? What are wisdom and love?
Mysticism could be many things, according to the textbook definitions, including the practice of becoming one with God, or the tendency to achieve spiritually altered states of being. But for Muzyka, mysticism is the study or the belief in a living force - something to be remembered—not theorized—like an ancient knowing already embedded in the body and the materials themselves. For the artist, mysticism is not something abstract; it is embodied in the materials, felt in the act of creation, and held in the silences between forms. As a mystic, Muzyka studies numbers symbolically to gain insights into her personal life, as evidenced by the artist’s titling of her works as “Zero” and “Quantum Timelines.” This makes sense because music is the codifying of sounds as levels of energy translated as numbers, and all things and events in the universe are made of energy, which can be understood as numbers.
People may generalize that spiritual beliefs are neither scientific nor factual, but spirituality and mysticism give us permission to understand and go beyond the current limitations of our scientific understanding. In “Quantum Timelines” (2025), the artist illustrates what appears to be time as a form of timeless presence: the artist is trying to understand existence and being as a presence that goes beyond the limitations of the concept of time (without the need to be at a particular place defined by a particular time).
Quantum refers to the branch of science that deals with the interaction of matter and energy at the smallest scale, where things get quirky (or “quarky”) and incomprehensible. A particle can be at two places at the same time. When we change the state of an entangled particle, its other pair flips state instantaneously no matter the distance between them. There is a tradeoff between the measurable properties of particles, such as the position and momentum; for example, when we try to measure the position of the particle to a higher degree, its momentum becomes less measurable. And this means that the particles’ behavior can be predicted as probabilities and not certainties.
However, Muzyka doesn’t want her work to serve as a scientific illustration of quantum theory - she listens for what it cannot yet say. Her work vibrates in the space where scientific knowing ends, and intuitive knowing begins. For example, it would be too elementary to argue that “Quantum Timelines” (2025) illustrates how time could be an illusion of the brain imposing a fictional, classical order of time and events onto a universe that actually consists of a quantum order. Of course, a timeless presence would involve the past blurring into the present and the future, but the most important aspect of Muyzka’s work is the feeling, the aura, or the presence itself that is infinite and is the sum, the origin, and the ending of all things. In the infinitely dense forest of memories that stretches back eons, the experiences and the sensations blur, and the presence of multitude reduces to a single infinite sum that is divine and infinite nature. Could this be a similar concept to the average theory of beauty (in which overlaying multiple portraits onto each other in a projection results in a more and more beautiful facial archetype)? The artist states that in her paintings the archetypes are not averages—they are vessels of presence, holding both the cosmic and the intimate. The divine isn’t distilled from many—it is remembered through each.
In “Quantum Timelines” (2025), we see circular strokes of pigment and smudges of coffee and wine, and they repeat from the base and go upwards. The circular strokes could be understood as the different iterations of time through a multitude of existences, of lives that are past, present, and the future. As our eye wanders around the composition, cascading through changes and levels, they create the illusion of time, which becomes a locality in the painting itself. The painting becomes an ancient ritualistic endeavor with the use of unconventional materials that give scent and open pathways to sensations and memories. The work becomes a contemporary relic, which is an oxymoron or an impossible concept, in which a contemporary artist produces acontemporary and atemporal, timeless statement about the profound nature of our existence, which for many has become a form of separation from the inner source of spiritual energy and infinite being that is divinity itself. The work, produced in 2025, at a time when the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine are raging on, and the climate crisis remains unsolved, is a sincere project of the Polish American artist to heal the Mother Earth by reconnecting to her core and her roots… prior to being born into labels like “Polish,” “American,” “woman,” and “artist.”
The materials - coffee, wine, earth pigments - are not decorative but rather are alchemical carriers of memory, holding the resonance of what cannot be said. Through experiencing Muzyka’s works, the audience should remember something long-forgotten within them that begins to unfold, rather than trying to understand the works themselves. The artist is less interested in proving a theory and more involved with invoking presence and inner truth as a form of metaphysical inquiry or a visionary lens. The artist aims to facilitate the resonance of symbols with possibility of connections to the quantum world, as the artist’s spiritual interest in number theory suggests. Muzyka’s work meets each viewer at the level of their readiness. The more open one is to the unseen, the deeper the invitation becomes.
What we can conclude from Muzyka’s solo exhibition, curated by Victoria J. Fry of the Visionary Art Collective, is that we are more than just our nationality, our gender, our sexuality, our religions, our socioeconomic status and power, etc. Yes, we are beings whose existence is profound and infinite, where death is not the end, and birth, not the only beginning. In essence, we are protected by the infinite will of the divine, which acts as the law of the universe, so that nothing can destroy the core of our being, that is our soul. Death is a fiction, and the only truth is the continuity of life itself, which carries with it an infinite library of remembrances. Death is a fiction because, even in death, we move onto the next life or the higher phase of spiritual belonging. And in life, we have the potential to do great things through the power of love, respect, kindness, and joy.
When we understand who we are, we are empowered to do truly great things that positively impact the world and transform our inner being and others, from within. By rejecting the linguistic order of understanding and defining, Muzyka marries the subtle language of painting with the nuanced and intuitive spiritual understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. In Muzyka, spirituality, compassion, kindness, and elevated state of being all coincide into a singular expression of acrylic residue, coffee, wine, and pigments on canvas.
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