Ewa Czwartos

Ewa Czwartos (b. 1998 in Sucha Beskidzka) is a painter, also working in drawing and animated film. In 2018-2023 she studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where she defended her diploma in the studio of Professor Andrzej Bednarczyk, under the supervision of Dr Michał Zawada. She collaborates with the Otwarta Pracownia Artistic Association in Kraków.

The heart of her painting is the re-reading of scenes and motifs deeply rooted in culture. Czwartos reaches for the themes that organised the imagination of the great masters of the Renaissance and the Baroque, and she is also inspired by the work of 19th-century Polish women artists and by anonymous figures from old photographs. Delicate Venuses and motionless Madonnas, frozen in the poses given to them by the old painters, she draws out of the frames of the past and gives them new life.

At the centre of her vision always stands the woman - shown either in a borderline situation or in an almost idyllic one. Mythological figures (Aphrodite, Athena, Hera) and legendary ones (Lucretia) appear in the pictures, but the artist focuses on moments of their lives less often exploited in culture, building multi-stranded narratives, eluding easy answers, about the fate of women and their striving for emancipation. The perverse title of her exhibition „Vitruvian Women” - playing with Leonardo's Vitruvian Man - aptly sums up this strategy.

Although she is an artist of an early phase, her distinct language quickly gained the recognition of critics and curators. She showed the solo exhibition „Vitruvian Women” in the Project Room of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, and in 2025 - together with Karolina Żądło - the exhibition „We Have No Troubles Here” at the GNYP Gallery in Berlin, realised with the Borowik Foundation. In 2024 her painting was presented as part of the Vogue Polska x BMW Art Academy project. Combining a painterly craft close to the old masters with a distinct, contemporary perspective, Czwartos is one of the most interesting voices of the youngest generation of Polish figurative painting.