Karolina Bielawska

Karolina Bielawska (b.1986) is a Polish Warsaw-based artist, working with the medium of painting and sculpture. Her characteristic style centers around a monochromatic palette complemented by carefully selected colors. Her forms offer ambiguous narrative modes: fractal lines and marks, accompanied by biomorphic and asymmetric shapes reminiscing mysterious silhouettes. Bielawska’s work signalizes the inter-dependability between elements that surround us. If one component crumbles, then the whole piece falls apart. There is thus an intimate relationship between the macro and the micro, between the compositions and the emotions they invoke, and between the detail and the whole. Bielawska’s visual language communicates a desire for harmony that constantly collides with violence, oppression, and brutality, turning the canvases into sites of tension and conflict. Bielawska takes this chaos and totalizes it into patterns. The controlled figures have a soothing effect on our senses. There is a calmness in anticipating what might come next. Bielawska sees her works as products of her contemplation about feelings and the possibilities of portraying them. The internal and personal sphere is what the artist is preoccupied with. She also finds that the energy, the emotional charge, and the memory of a particular place influence her work, herein shaping a site-specific sensibility. Among Bielawska’s distinctive methods is the use of bitumen paint. She shares the concept behind this strategy: “I started using bitumen paint a few years ago when looking for a material that would relate to a resistant, heavy, flooding mass, similar to asphalt. I painted a series of paintings that referred to the idea of home – as a dream asylum. I wanted to find examples of such houses in the urban space and I chose villas from the interwar period. One of them was demolished because it hindered the construction of a new asphalt road in Warsaw. I decided in some – but not literal – way to use such a destructive, flooding element in my own pieces. Bitumen paint turned out to be the right solution. I liked its earthy black and its roughness. I began using it in subsequent paintings and installations because it fit well into the broader context of my works – wrestling, struggling, persevering despite instability”.