Patrycja Piętka

Patrycja Piętka (b. 1998 in Katowice) is a painter, stage designer and creator of installations. She completed her studies at the Faculty of Painting of the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts with distinction in 2022, with the diploma „Vargtimmen / The Hour of the Wolf” in the studio of Professor Mirosław Sikorski; in parallel she studied stage design and collaborates on student film études. She is currently an assistant in Painting Studio I at her alma mater, associated with the Art Agenda Nova gallery in Kraków.

In her work Piętka constantly returns to the motif of night - a time of unease and a source of melancholy - and to the vanitas connected with transience. She uses a monochrome palette of colours, referring to the aesthetic of negative photography, and from the language of film she draws her way of building tension, her symbolism and her understatements. Her cycles evoke a feeling of melancholy and unease, tenderly rendering the emotionality of nature.

The artist's work is strongly rooted in metaphysics, and painting is for her a kind of spiritual search - she draws on pre-Slavic beliefs, the concept of the life-giving breath (ruach) and 19th-century spiritualist séances, adding to her pictures swirling, spectral vapours. Her first solo exhibition was „Depth” (Art Agenda Nova, 2021); she has shown her works at, among others, the Zachęta, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, MOCAK and the Krupa Art Foundation in Wrocław, and her paintings are in numerous private collections in Poland and abroad.