Blind Mirror – in progress

Katarzyna Swinarska is a visual artist: painter, video artist, and creator of multimedia installations. She is a graduate of the Painting Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where she defended her doctoral degree in art in 2014.

In her work, she consistently explores female experience, drawing inspiration from family stories, historical painting, fairy tales, and contemporary life. Her pieces are characterized by a bold approach to the themes of female sexuality and corporeality — one that is not without humor and irony — combining stereotypically feminine traits with those that still lack cultural acceptance.

Working across different aesthetics, the Artist experiments to capture the quintessence of a "feminine" language of painterly expression. Some canvases are large, vibrant, and filled with intense colors dominated by an overwhelming pink. Others are dark and suffocating, evoking flowers that are beautiful yet poisonous or that devour their victims; figurative and abstract, as non-obvious and varied as Swinarska's own perception of femininity with all its contradictions.

In her video works, the question of artistic identity is one of the most significant concerns, and for Swinarska, her practice is largely a space for defining herself as a woman who creates. In this process, other artists — her predecessors as well as her contemporaries — play an important role. Swinarska pays close attention to their struggles with forging a creative identity and navigating life as an artist in society, as well as within their personal relationships.

She is the recipient of the Grand Prize at the Gdańsk Art Biennale 2023 for the film Defiant Hearts, and the First Prize at the IN OUT Festival 2016 for the film Digressive Identity — both works are part of the collection of NOMUS / the National Museum in Gdańsk, Poland.

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