Monika Marchewka

How to be Eaten is Monika Marchewka’s second solo show with Artistellar in London. The show stages a seductive and uneasy banquet of belonging. Across this body of work, the desire to be welcomed is bound to the pressure of making oneself pleasing, presentable, and consumable.

Drawing on the visual language of vintage reciipe illustrations and theatrical food display, Marchewka explores the gap between nourishment and presentation, care and performance. Her still lifes are lush and alluring, yet charged with tension: offerings become excessive, arrangements feel unstable, and beauty begins to curdle.

In these works, the subject shifts from host to dish — from how to serve to How to be Eaten. Ants and bees recur as quiet protagonists, drawn to what has been prepared and left behind. They introduce appetite, time, and decay, turning staged images of abundance into scenes of emotional excess and slow collapse.

At once tender and unsettling, the exhibition reflects on hospitality, self-stylisation, and the fragile line between being welcomed and being consumed.