Julia KowalSKa

Julia Kowalska

Julia Kowalska (b. 1998, Warsaw, Poland) is a contemporary artist living and working in Warsaw. She graduated with an MFA from the Painting Faculty at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2022. Her practice centres on figurative painting, exploring themes of identity, the body, and the shifting boundary between consciousness and the subconscious.

Kowalska’s work is rooted in an engagement with dream poetics and the aesthetics of the uncanny. Her paintings construct ambiguous, atmospheric spaces in which figures appear suspended between presence and dissolution, often emerging from indistinct, blurred environments. These compositions evoke a sense of psychological interiority, where the familiar and the unfamiliar coexist, and where meaning remains fluid and unresolved.

Working primarily with the human figure, Kowalska depicts bodies in states of tension, intimacy, and transformation. Her imagery often draws on personal and subjective experience, yet resists direct narrative, instead operating through suggestion, ambiguity, and emotional resonance. Central to her practice is an interest in ambivalence — the coexistence of opposing states such as attraction and discomfort, clarity and obscurity, control and fragmentation.

Alongside painting, Kowalska has developed sculptural and installation-based works, notably using wax to create forms that reference the body while remaining abstracted from it. These works explore materiality and corporeality through processes of deformation and instability, reinforcing her broader investigation into the body as both physical and symbolic entity.

Her practice is also defined by a relational approach to image-making, where individual works are conceived in dialogue with one another. Through this method, meaning is constructed across groups of paintings, allowing for shifts, contradictions, and layered interpretations to emerge within the exhibition space.

Kowalska’s work situates her within a new generation of contemporary European painters engaging with figuration as a site of psychological and conceptual exploration.

Kowalska made her international debut in London with a solo exhibition presented by Sarah Kravitz in 2023, and subsequently participated in the residency programme remotely.