Katarzyna Wroniak - The Interview

IDA Your artistic journey followed a major change in your professional life, after more than two decades working in international real estate. What led you to make the decision to dedicate yourself fully to painting, and what did you discover about yourself through this transition

KW Painting entered my life at a moment when many things I had previously considered stable began to change.

For more than twenty years, I worked in international real estate. It was a world based on decisions, responsibility, strategy and measurable outcomes, and for a long time I felt completely at home in it. Then something shifted. I began questioning not so much my profession, but the identity I had built around it.

When I started painting, I had no idea where it would lead. What surprised me was how immediate the connection was. Painting gave me access to a part of myself that had always been there but had never had a language.

I discovered that I could exist without constantly defining myself through what I achieve or what role I perform. I could simply observe, respond and create.

I also no longer feel that I have to choose between those two parts of my life. My professional experience is part of me, just as painting is. What changed is that today I know my identity is much larger than either of them.

Perhaps that is the most important thing painting has given me: a different relationship with myself.

IDA You describe painting as a way of “discovering rather than explaining.” How does this idea influence the way you approach a new canvas, particularly when you begin without a predetermined composition?

KW Usually I begin with very little. I don’t make sketches and I rarely have a predetermined composition. Sometimes there is a colour, a gesture or a sensation I want to follow. That is enough.

Once the first marks are on the canvas, the situation changes. I start responding to what is actually there rather than to what I thought might be there. A shape creates tension somewhere else. A new layer obscures something I had become attached to. An accident opens a direction I could never have planned.

This is what I mean by discovering rather than explaining.

If I already knew exactly what the finished painting should look like, much of the reason for painting it would disappear for me. I don’t want the canvas simply to execute an idea I have already formulated in my mind.

Of course, there is discipline in the process. I make hundreds of decisions about colour, structure, rhythm, edges, transparency and paint itself. But those decisions happen inside a process that remains open.

There is a beautiful moment when the painting begins to have its own logic. From then on, my role is to pay attention.

IDA Your current practice is strongly connected to organic and biomorphic forms, while your recent body of work

Inner Landscapes

explores perception, emergence, and what exists between the visible and the sensed. What do these forms represent for you as they gradually emerge during the painting process?

KW I don’t think of these forms as representations of particular things.

People sometimes recognise bodies, plants, landscapes, microscopic structures or fragments of nature in them. I understand why, because the forms often seem strangely familiar. But I am much more interested in that familiarity than in giving it a name.

Lately, an even more fundamental question has entered my work: where does form come from?

I look at life and see endless forms — a body, a tree, a stone, a cell — all appearing separate and identifiable. But beneath that visible difference, I sense a kind of continuity. A space, or perhaps a field, in which forms arise, change and eventually disappear.

I don’t know what that space is, and I don’t want to define it. Painting allows me to approach the question without having to answer it.

That is increasingly where my attention goes: not only towards the object that becomes visible, but towards the almost unidentifiable space from which visibility itself seems to arise.

Perhaps that is why the forms in my paintings often hover between recognition and abstraction. I want them to remain there for a while, before the mind decides what they are.

IDA Intuition plays a central role in your practice, and you often describe yourself as following the painting rather than controlling it. How do you know when a work has reached the point where you should stop, and how much of that decision is intuitive versus conscious?

KW I know because at some point I stop asking the painting what it needs.

Until then, something keeps pulling me back. Sometimes I know exactly what is wrong. Sometimes I only feel that the painting is not yet complete.

And then there is a moment when that tension disappears.

It doesn’t mean that everything has been resolved. I actually like paintings that retain uncertainty. But nothing more needs to be added.

Learning to recognise that moment has been important, because there is always the temptation to improve one more area. Very often that is exactly when you can lose something alive in the work.

So yes, the final decision is intuitive. But I think intuition becomes more precise with experience. The more I paint, the more I trust that moment when the impulse to interfere simply stops.

IDA Several of your works, including Memory, Within, Unfolding Life, and Harmony , explore ideas such as transformation, perception, inner experience, and the relationship between light and darkness. How do personal experiences become transformed into visual language without becoming a literal narrative?

KW My paintings are not autobiographical in a literal sense, but they could not exist without my biography.

Everything I have lived through has changed the way I perceive the world. Experiences remain in us long after the story itself is over — sometimes as memory, but also as sensation, fear, tenderness, tension or an almost physical trace that is difficult to describe.

I think some of that enters the painting.

But I don’t enter the studio thinking, “Today I am going to paint this particular experience.” That would feel too illustrative to me. What has happened in my life has already passed through me and changed me. I paint from the person who remains after that transformation.

This is also how I understand the relationship between darkness and light in my work. I don’t see them as opposing forces. One makes the other perceptible. Some of the most difficult experiences can contain beauty, while something beautiful can also carry tension or unease.

Painting allows these contradictions to coexist without resolving them into a story.

And that matters because I don’t want viewers to understand my experience. I want them to have their own.

IDA You currently live and work in Warsaw, while your previous career was international and your artistic practice is now reaching an international audience. Looking ahead, what would you most like to explore or challenge within your painting practice?

KW Perhaps one of my greatest personal challenges will be not to become attached to what already works.

As my visual language becomes more recognisable and people begin to respond to particular qualities in the work, there is naturally a temptation to protect them. But I don’t want to repeat myself simply because a certain kind of painting is appreciated or recognised as mine. I want to remain willing to risk losing something in order to find something deeper.

Artistically, I would like to challenge how far painting can go beyond representing what we already recognise. My work began with inner experience and gradually moved towards questions of perception and the formation of visible reality. Now I find myself asking something more fundamental: what exists before we divide the world into separate forms, before we name what we see?

The challenge is to approach that through painting without turning it into an illustration of a philosophical idea. I want it to remain physical — paint, colour, surface, space — and yet somehow allow the viewer to sense something beyond the material object.

I also want to challenge myself formally: to work on a larger scale, to become more courageous with space, and to allow parts of a painting to remain unresolved when resolving them would make the work less truthful.

Above all, I want to remain brave enough to change — to keep questioning my own choices and allowing the work to evolve, even when that means taking the risk of failure.

And I want to go deeper into paint itself: its materiality, transparency, weight, and its ability to create something that can be sensed before it can be understood.