Bartosz Kowal

Episode 3Bartosz Kowal
Series

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.

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Episode 3 of 3

Bartosz 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

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wyłączeni
twice formal
00:00

Bartosz Kowal

sunny
Bartosz Kowalsunny, 2024
70 x 30cm
Untitled
Bow Down
Featured Artist

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Bartosz Kowal
Artist
Bartosz Kowal
B.1995, Polish

Bartosz Kowal (b.1995 Poland) lives and works in Warsaw and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw with an MFA in 2022. His artistic exploration is driven by affection for the quiet and the ordinary. He is inspired by found footage, which tends to evoke memories of a common moment encased and faded by the hectic nature of everyday life. Kowal depicts moments of stillness, often lacking context, leaving only a hint of circumstances attachable equally to a daily occurrence or a dream. For Kowal, being constantly distracted is an easily accessible pleasure, and he aims to counter this with stillness and ambiguity in his paintings. ...

More Works By: Bartosz Kowal