Bartosz Kowal
Mourning and Melancholia
Art has the unique ability to externalize trauma, transforming invisible emotional wounds into tangible visual forms. This chapter explores how artists make personal and collective grief visible, turning pain into a shared experience and fostering empathy through creative expression.
View SeriesBartosz Kowal
Working primarily with painting and drawing, Bartosz Kowal explores the quiet tension between memory and perception, translating fleeting moments into images that linger in stillness. His practice draws on found footage, fragments of the everyday that carry traces of lives once lived, gestures once made, scenes once seen. These recovered images, worn by time and repetition, become vessels for a shared yet elusive sense of familiarity. Kowal transforms them into compositions where context is deliberately withheld, leaving only subtle cues that oscillate between the ordinary and the dreamlike. Through this restraint, Kowal cultivates a space of ambiguity, where moments seem to hover outside of narrative or chronology. His paintings resist immediacy, inviting viewers to dwell in the quiet uncertainty of recognition. What emerges is not a depiction of events, but of atmospheres, of pauses, hesitations, and afterimages that evoke the slow erosion of memory. By countering the distractions of contemporary life with stillness and opacity, Kowal’s work proposes an alternate rhythm of seeing: one that values attention over spectacle, and tenderness over clarity. In these silent fragments, the everyday becomes a site of reflection—where what is most ephemeral finds a quiet, enduring presence.
Episode
Explore the artist's work, stories, and experiences tied to this episode's theme.
Featured Artist
Meet the artist featured in this episode—explore their profile & artworks.
More Works By: Bartosz Kowal