Maja Kitajewska (b. 1986) is a Warsaw-based artist whose practice originated in painting but over time expanded into new territories, positioning itself at the intersection of textile art and sculpture. Through the meticulous technique of glass bead embroidery, Kitajewska transforms surfaces into layered, tactile forms that blur the line between material and meaning. Her work embraces the interplay of softness and weight, turning fabric into sculptural forms that both carry and collapse under the weight of existential reflection.
Kitajewska emerges from a traditional painter’s workshop but leaves behind the flatness of the canvas. She takes over the picture’s surface, decorating it, embroidering it with glass beads, and folds and bends it, giving it sculptural form. What was once a flat image becomes fabric, not just metaphorically but physically, gaining mass, weight and a spatial presence that bulges toward the viewer.
Ornament as Subversion
Glass beads, a decorative material linked to craft and ornament, add layers both to the physical surface and to meaning. Their shimmer draws the eye but also provokes existential reflection. The word “decoration” here is twisted, no longer mere beautification or embellishment, but something ambiguous. Material and the form that emerges from it in her work intervene directly in meaning. In the series Shake the Disease (2018), beaded insects land on delicate painted flowers. They encircle the image, dominate it, appropriate the composition. Beauty and fragility are swallowed by decoration that both surrounds and threatens, playing with contrasts of good and evil, beauty and ugliness. The dichotomies dissolve as form (the insect) overtakes content (the flowers). The beaded insects disrupt the composition and subvert its representational nature. This second, sewn form not only changes the work’s shape and physical dimension but also enters its very content. It corrupts, pollutes, revealing that good and evil are inseparable, that neither exists in pure form, and that beauty cannot exist without ugliness, just as ugliness depends on beauty.
Glass beads become a medium that connects with the viewer through texture and the play of light. Light reflected by the beads attracts the eye while revealing details that shift depending on the angle, just as light opens the possibility for discovery within the mysteries of human vision. Glass bead embroidery, associated with ornament and craft, gradually accumulates colour, texture and shimmer on the surface. These layers thicken and begin to demand their own presence. What was once an image becomes an object.
In earlier works, the beads directed attention, focusing it on fragments of the canvas and compelling the viewer to come closer and discover the form’s layering. Over time, the bead structure began to detach from the painted surface, functioning autonomously, as if the form itself emerged from the image, emancipating itself from two-dimensional space, much like the artist evolved from traditional painting. The form became an independent fabric, a concept the artist defines as an “elastic sculpture”. This structure grows heavier and bends downward toward the ground. Form takes on meaning, and the play between form and content in her work grows increasingly complex.
Fragility in Bloom
In the series States of Impermanence (2024), shown in her most recent solo exhibition at Szydłowski Gallery, floral sculptures flow out of their vases under the weight of the material. Flowers, naturally vibrant, meant to rise upward, proud of their beauty, here droop low under the heaviness of the fabric, transforming the sculptures into reflections on the fleeting nature of beauty and the impermanence of existence in a recognisable form. These flowers are wilted from the start, beautiful yet leaning toward decay. Instead of celebrating life’s triumph through plant symbolism, it is the material in Kitajewska’s work that shifts the narrative toward fragility and the inevitable passing of life.
In newer works, which turn inward, such as Self Portrait Object (2023), Kitajewska transforms her own body into an object of artistic fabric, one that can be folded, bent and arranged like any other piece of fabric. The body becomes material, physical, fleshy and weighted. Embroidered animal paws, resembling tattoos, evoke memory and identity, signalling that this body is not an anonymous form, but one that once held personality and history. This duality of the body permeates the work. Just like her wilted flowers, the artist allows the body to unfold and collapse under its own weight, to fall freely, underscoring its material nature and its inevitable subjection to the same physical laws that govern all things.
Maja Kitajewska graduated with distinction from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2011, earning her degree in the Painting Studio of Professor Wiesław Szamborski, with a diploma annexe in Artistic Textile under Professor Dorota Grynczel. She currently teaches as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Her recent solo exhibitions include States of Impermanence (2025) and Glass Light, Glass Days (2021) at Szydłowski Gallery. In 2022, her work was presented in Maja Kitajewska & Paolo Uccello: The Radiance of Otherworldly Pleasures at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. She has also exhibited internationally, including at Positions Art Fair in Berlin (2019) and Enter Art Fair in Copenhagen (2022).
