The exhibition Me and My Doney Gal is about everyday life, decision-making, remembering and the need to capture certain moments that affect us or transcend us. In these moments, Jozef Mnich finds something familiar and seemingly stable, something that makes sense to him in today’s unsettled world. His works engage with memory and its ambiguity, with forgetting and the resurfacing of recollections. Through aesthetic experience, they preserve days and images that might otherwise quickly dissolve. Motifs drawn from seemingly ordinary situations become sources of deeper exploration, encoding and uncovering. They accumulate in the form of fragments, overlapping motifs and surfaces, or, conversely, appear formally clear, direct and striking.

Jozef Mnich’s way of thinking about the contexts surrounding the exhibition’s themes, as well as his creative process itself, is similarly multilayered. He begins with sketches, followed by an underpainting or painted layer on the surface, over which he combines graphic techniques and airbrush. He then adds further removable coatings and develops a plan for the areas he intends to scrape away or remove. He has been developing this layering technique for an extended period, testing different possibilities through experimentation. He deliberately allows painted layers to crack, scratches through them or removes them entirely, revealing what lies beneath. The result is a form of controlled yet partly accidental destruction of both the surface and the depicted image. Mnich explores new ways of removing the upper latex layer, creating specific types of marks within the pictorial field. At times, he also integrates selected printmaking techniques such as monotype and linocut. The monotypes, unique oil-based impressions transferred from a surface, have a more painterly than graphic character, shifting away from clear representation towards blurred or merging imagery. Linocut prints, by contrast, are more concrete and reveal Mnich’s sensitivity to detail and drawing. In his most recent works, however, he is gradually moving away from combining techniques and obscuring motifs, focusing instead on pure oil painting and on greater specificity and narrative clarity in the depicted scenes.