Fragment from a review by Stanisław Tabisz entitled "The Missing Menina"

The artist's studio is a magical place in which the painter creates his world and surrounds himself with his favorite subjects, objects, accessories, and items neccesarry in order to realize each of his paintings.

For Zbigniew Sprycha, the studio is a self-styled theater of life in which he stages his existential drama as a person. In it, he creates a hyper reality of experiences and feelings by taking advantage of the studio's scenery and using its objects and tools as models for his work. The artist says, "Painting is a means for me to register the state in which I find myself." His large and small canvases drowned in dark brown pigments create an unusual atmosphere. It resembles the mood when a light slowly dims on a theater's stage and the audience surrounded by darkness looks out toward the barely visible scene. In a theater however, actors play the roles, which they are assigned. In the studio of Zbigniew Sprycha, everything exists in reality. The studio is a place of life, creation, shelter, and escape. It brings out the feeling of alone-ness and of the immeasurable infinite...

Sprycha's treats his recent paintings as a continued story of his life, of the problems and callings which life puts before him and that he finds impossible to reconcile. ...A recurring motif in Sprycha's work is a young maid of honor depicted in a very eloquent and dramatic manner that overtly references Diego Valazquez' Las Meninas. ... Sprycha has used the Spanish master's subject matter to create a novel body of work in which his protagonists fascinate viewers with metaphors of divorce and separation; they touch us with the truth of authentic experience. At base, the Krakow painter expresses the painful feeling of absence. Sprycha's "Meninas," as girls of blood and bones, are not present in their traditional, characteristically wide dresses. As if they had evaporated; as if someone had, without knowing why, removed them from the scene and displayed their dresses on stiff metal scaffolding...

Even as he paints a table, Sprycha covers it with a heavy tablecloth or ornate rug that reaches to the floor, suggesting that it too is a sort of Menina leaking childish beauty. It doesn't have a thin bodice, or a head crowned in a ruff of ribbons, and it seems that under its dress, there is only empty space. A young maid's outfit is reduced to nothing in the paintings of Zbigniew Sprycha. It remains rolled up like a rag; a textile in gold stripes thrown on the floor. A muddy sepia background surrounds it as in the other paintings into which Sprycha introduced items of daily use such as a familiar round table, silver bowls and rugs. On a shelf in his studio, Sprycha keeps a small statuette of a ceramic Menina figurine that he has meticulously painted. This is his permanent model, created when the artist was still in secondary school... Inevitably, Sprycha leads us to question what is the live current and what is the baroque costume of the drama whose backdrop is the artist's studio transcribed onto the canvas in dark browns and pearls of light by the artist's imagination.