Arts Thread

I am a painter born in 1988 in the industrial region of Upper Silesia, Poland. After completing law studies, I emigrated and eventually graduated from the DOGtime Expanded Painting program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2024. My artistic journey includes a significant period in Leipzig, where I immersed myself in the New Leipzig School’s painterly environment, culminating in a group exhibition at HGB, Leipzig, in 2023. Since 2018, I’ve been living and working in the Netherlands, drawing inspiration from both places and their unique approaches to painting. I’m deeply interested in transformations. My process currently unfolds like this: painting, printing, and repainting—first upright, then upside down, then back to upright. I can’t foresee what the image will become until I’m faced with the decisions made in the process. Essentially, this means making a mark and then reacting to it, creating moments of revelation. This requires trust in spontaneously emerging solutions. Trying to embrace uncertainty, surrendering to the fluidity of paint. For me, paint, painting, and paintings are forces that can charge, open up, strangle, tell a story, bounce joyously, conceal and reveal, twist and surprise, change a point of view, drip, fall apart, be real and illusionary, complicated and simple, smooth and rough, go over and under. They embody all of these qualities simultaneously, surpassing presupposed contradictions and impossibilities. Large formats play a crucial role in this process, allowing freedom without constraints—no compromises, just singular focus. I handle the material as it asserts itself strongly, uncovering relationships between parts and wholes, sometimes disappointed. In my recent series, including Untitled Painting: Searching for What I Cannot Put into Words (2024), I draw inspiration from Monet’s Rouen Cathedrals. I employ layered techniques to develop an ambiguous visual language that shifts between reality and illusion. Through printing multiple versions, I stop time—one long continuous movement or visual pulses of short brushstrokes. Up close, human and botanical forms emerge, along with forces like gravity. When you step further back, the paintings create a landscape that immerses you in a situation, perhaps even rearranging your reality for a brief moment.