Polish artist Marcin Janusz (b. 1991) works at the intersection of painting, object-making, and material experimentation. Drawing from biology, mythology, and ancient belief systems, his practice explores the cyclical nature of life, transformation, and the porous boundaries between the human body and the natural world.
Janusz’s works are simultaneously poetic and primal: they are speculative landscapes, biological metaphors and cosmologies of transformation. Drawing on biology, geology, ancient beliefs, fables and myth, his art occupies a space between the rational and the intuitive, where human physiology and the natural world reflect and rhyme with one another.
A hallmark of Janusz’s practice is his use of unconventional materials, such as soil, sugar, resin, and crystal, which transform the painted surface into a site of tension between desire and decay. These substances carry their own symbolic weight, amplifying the work’s sensory and emotional register. As Janusz reflects, “sugar functions for me as a metaphor of something precious and desirable, ‘sweetness’, while simultaneously evoking fragility and impermanence, a substance that can dissolve irreversibly at any moment.”
These materials transform his canvases into multisensory environments: sugary glosses invoke taste and fragility, soil materials evoke cycles of growth and decay, while resinous textures recall the viscous fluids of organic processes. In works such as Mother of Pearl (“Masa perłowa”, 2024), where sugar and resin animate coral-like structures, and in Puddles of Dreams (“Kałuże marzeń”, 2021), whose resin and glass sand pools pull the eye into dreamlike terrains, Janusz’s surfaces seem to breathe and ferment.
In Tower of Humans (“Wieża z ludzi”, 2021), thick, layered pigment and resin build sculptural reliefs that blur bodies into landscapes, while pieces from Once Upon a Time… Life (“Było sobie życie”, 2024) evoke primordial matter in a state of continual flux. Across these forms, amorphous bodies, crystalline growths and visceral colour fields suggest works that are less representations than transitory states between emergence and dissolution.
Between Myth and Science
At the heart of Janusz’s artistic inquiry is a deep exploration of life’s cycles and continuities: beginnings and ends, continuity and decay, and how memory, myth, and matter entwine. His imagery doesn’t simply depict; it performs, inviting viewers to sense beyond the visual and to engage with form as experience rather than representation.
Two 2024 exhibitions also underscore the expansive reach of Janusz’s practice. In Milky Flesh (“Mleczne ciałka” at the LETO Gallery, Warsaw) and Było sobie życie (Szara Kamienica Gallery, Kraków), his work wove scientific reference with primordial myth, staging painting as an alchemical site where metabolic rhythms, transformation and emergence unfold. This trajectory expanded internationally in 2025 with Ghosts and Roots at FIERMAN in New York, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Created during a residency at Residency Unlimited, the paintings drew on Slavic cosmology and ecological reflection, engaging with ideas of forgotten spirits and elemental cycles. As the exhibition text notes, Ghosts and Roots “becomes a reflection on the cycles of nature, the memory of matter, and the spiritual dimension of human rootedness.”
Through Janusz’s use of elemental substances and ancient narrative structures, he positions painting as a rhizomatic field. It’s a space where meaning proliferates rather than resolves, and where human experience is entangled with broader ecological and mythic systems. His works resist singular readings, instead unfolding as processes shaped by matter, memory and transformation.
Across his practice, painting operates as a living system: mutable, absorptive and responsive to the world from which it emerges. By collapsing distinctions between the human and non-human, the scientific and the mythic, Janusz contributes to a wider contemporary discourse on materiality and interdependence, proposing painting not as representation, but as a site of ongoing becoming.
Born in Przeworsk, Poland, Marcin Janusz trained initially in Medical Rescue before completing an MA in Painting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, with an exchange year at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. In 2023, he earned his PhD at his alma mater, consolidating a practice that continues to inform his sensitivity to corporeality, fragility and organic processes. He also received the Młoda Polska 2025 Fellowship.
His practice has been featured in major group exhibitions across Poland, South Korea, and the United States, including Nostalgia. Seekers of Fading Stars (“Nostalgia. Poszukiwacze gasnących gwiazd”, MOCAK, Kraków, 2025), South of the Border, West of the Sun (Lazy Mike Gallery, Seoul, 2024), and From the Ashes (“Z popiołów”, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, 2024). Janusz’s works are held in prominent collections such as the National Museum in Gdańsk, dela.art collection (Warsaw), and PURO Hotel Collection (Warsaw).
