Painting is my best thing In conversation with Julia Kowalska

Julia Kowalska (born in Radom in 1998) is the 5^th year student at the Faculty of Painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She is a painter but also creates objects and video art.

Recently, she received a Special Mention from the editors of Contemporary Lynx Magazine as a part of the art contest titled Nowy Obraz Nowe Spojrzenie – the 11^th edition, organised by the University of Arts in Poznań. On this occasion, we had a pleasure to talk to this young artist. 

Maria Brzosko: What made you interested in arts?

Julia Kowalska: In my childhood I was quite convinced painting is my best thing, also no one stopped me in thinking that way, so I was growing with painting, my parents were collecting tones of my works. Interest in arts came to me naturally, it was developing with me and my identity. 

MB: Your artworks seem to convey a significant amount intimacy, as well as biology and truth in representation of the body. How did you come up with such peculiar, yet touching approach?

JK: At the very beginning of my studies on Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts I started to work with bodily related matters, begin with processing corporeality into an abstracted forms, masses or insides, once focused on it’s biological issues, another time on it’s sensual impressions. After almost 3 years of that struggle, I came up with a few figurative ideas which made my process much different, and allows to place more processed, abstract pieces in the new context. Current series I’m working on obviously arised and derived from previous experiences, I’m trying to keep them and all my most important painting lines close to each other so that they interpenetrate and form a single whole. 

MB: You have participated in exhibitions and received many recognitions; your style seems to be bold and fearless. Is there anything that you wouldn’t like the audiences to see in your artworks?

JK: No, I can’t find such thing, I’ve never been thinking about that. I can assume what someone can find in my artworks, but it will partially be my view, I believe it depends on individual sensibility.

MB: In your paintings and art objects, there is an unconventional play of textures, colours, and movements. What inspires you to combine them?

JK: I often attempt to catch sort of divergent sensuality of the body, of figures, their intimacy and scenes I’m placing them into. Looking for a certain dissonance in perceiving corporeality and sexuality, and lately in my figurative works, an ambiguity and ambivalence of human relationships, I play with sort of repetitive, subtle disorientation and it made me look for equally ambiguous and ephemeral visual solutions and juxtaposes. I try to express blended contents.

MB: Considering the variety of representation in the pieces that you have created, do you think that there is any line a painter should not cross?

JK: No, I think it’s not, I also don’t find myself close to any. 

MB: Some of your paintings seem to have a vivid mood, which is dictated by a specific colour palette. Do you differentiate what is more important in the artworks – emotions or visual immediacy?

JK: I don’t, it’s not calculated, probably both are equally important or should complement each other. I very much value intuition. 

MB: Are there any artists that you tend to look up to, during your creative process?

JK: Fascinations with favourite or newly discovered artworks are necessary, inherent in, I think, any process. So sure, there always are, although list is fluid. Currently it would be Elizabeth Glaessner, Mary Herbert, Rae Klein, Natalia Gonzalez Martin, Paweł Olszewski.