Biography

Katarzyna Swinarska is a visual artist working in painting, video, and multimedia installation. She graduated from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Poland, where she defended her doctorate in art in 2014.

In her work, she consistently explores female experience, drawing inspiration from family narratives, historical painting, fairy tales, and contemporary life. She inscribes the experience of one woman into the universal, culturally and historically conditioned fate of generations of great-grandmothers, mothers, and sisters. The artist reveals their emotionality, vulnerability, sensitivity, and sensuality while uncovering underlying strength, passion, determination, ruthlessness, and cruelty. Her works are characterised by a bold approach to themes of female sexuality and corporeality, tempered by distance, humour, and irony.

Using a range of aesthetics, the Artist experiments to capture the quintessence of a “feminine” language of painterly expression. The canvases are large, vibrating, and full of intense colour, among which an overpowering pink dominates. Others, by contrast, are dark and stifling, evoking flowers that are beautiful but poisonous, or that devour their victims. Figurative and abstract, they are as ambiguous and varied as Swinarska’s own view of femininity with all its contradictions.

In her video works, the question of artistic identity is one of the most important themes, and for Swinarska, creative practice is to a large extent a field for defining herself as a woman who creates. Other women artists play a significant role in this process, both her predecessors and her peers. Swinarska closely follows how they struggle to forge a creative identity and to function as artists in society, as well as in their relationships with those close to them.

She is the recipient of the Main Prize at the Gdańsk Art Biennale 2023 for the film "Defiant Hearts" and the First Prize at Festival IN OUT 2016 for the film "Digressive Identity"—both works are in the collection of NOMUS (Department of Contemporary Art at the National Museum in Gdańsk).

Recent projects include: a painting series „Lady Swimmers” as part of the Art Festival „Dreams of Gdynia” Przypływ Foundation, Gdynia 2026; residency & exhibition in Vienna with the project „Blind Mirror — in progrness” (2026); "The Name of the Rose" exhibition at Kashubian Philharmonic Hall, Wejherowo 2026; the film trilogy "Defiant Hearts" (2021-2025); "Fleeing the War—in progress" painting exhibition at Usine Kugler in Geneva (2024); "Secrets of Factory Girls" at the Academic Design Centre in Łódź (2024); "Absent Lovers" at Przypływ Gallery in Gdynia (2025); "Fragments of Reality. Berlin—Tricity" at the State Art Gallery in Sopot (2025); and "Adhesions on the Tip of the Heart" at Arttrakt Gallery in Wrocław (2025).