Agnieszka Brzeżańska

Agnieszka Brzeżańska (b. 1972 in Gdańsk) is a visual artist - painter, ceramicist, photographer and author of video films. She studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Gdańsk (1992-1995) and Warsaw (1995-1997), where she defended her diploma in the painting studio of Professor Stefan Gierowski, and then - as a scholar of the Japanese government - at the Tokyo University of the Arts (1998-2001).

Her work draws simultaneously on two orders: on science (physics, biology) and on systems of cognition marginalised by modernity - alchemy, parapsychology, esotericism, Taoism, folk and indigenous knowledge, matriarchal traditions. From this interweaving is born a revision of the foundations of Western rationality: of the linear conception of time and the Cartesian separation of mind from matter. In return Brzeżańska proposes an affirmative image of the world as a web of interdependencies and of transpersonal and interspecies flows of energy.

She translates this philosophy into a practice close to craft and to nature. She paints batiks in Java, fires ceramics in living fire on the Japanese island of Kyushu, gathers herbs in the meadows near Mława, weaves jacquard fabrics and fires ceramic tiles in old craft workshops. She works in painting, drawing, photography and film, and in later years increasingly in ceramics, wickerwork and textile - in her organic forms human bodies, snakes and symbols of flora and fauna recur.

An important strand of her activity is the motif of the river and of community. Since 2016, together with Ewa Ciepielewska, she has run Flow / Przepływ - an artistic residency on the Vistula, combining a voyage, being together and experiment.

Brzeżańska collaborates with the BWA Warszawa gallery and Tokyo's NANZUKA, and her works are held, among others, in the collection of the Saatchi Gallery in London, the Museum of Art in Łódź and the ING Polish Art Foundation. She has shown solo exhibitions in Rome, Berlin, London and Basel, and in Poland, among others, at the Królikarnia in Warsaw („The Whole Earth a National Park”) and the Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków. In 2024 she was honoured with the Annual Award of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage in the field of the visual arts - a confirmation of the standing of one of the most distinct attitudes in Polish contemporary art.