• Ewa Czwartos’ paintings revisit inherited imagery and motifs through a contemporary lens, exploring femininity, cultural memory and the ways historical ideals continue to shape the present.

    Ewa Czwartos’ practice examines femininity and canons of beauty through painting, drawing and animated film. Drawing on classical, historical and symbolic imagery, she revisits culturally entrenched scenes and motifs, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary ideas of femininity and generational difference. Her paintings function as a kind of time machine, recalling a bygone world while considering the historical roles and expectations that continue to resonate in the present.

     

    The female figure sits at the heart of Czwartos’ artistic vision. Her works explore the ways women have been represented and understood across generations, looking at the relationship between inherited ideals and contemporary experience. Repetition and formation are central to this, with figures often appearing together as individual presences that remain connected to a larger whole. Bodies echo and relate to one another, suggesting both continuity and difference while resisting a singular reading of femininity.

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    Czwartos’ approach to historical imagery is rooted in a dialogue between past and present. Rather than simply recreating established visual traditions, she reshapes them through her own contemporary perspective, creating paintings that question the cultural memory embedded within familiar images. This is particularly evident in her 2024 solo exhibition Vitruvian Women, which reached back to culturally entrenched scenes and images in order to consider the female figure and its place within historical and contemporary narratives.

     

    Born in Sucha Beskidzka in 1998, Czwartos graduated with honours from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2023 with the project I Paint Because My Mouth Is Sealed. Her work has been exhibited at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Zbrojownia Sztuki in Gdańsk, Galeria Prześwit in Warsaw and Otwarta Pracownia in Kraków. In 2025, she made her international exhibition debut with We Have No Troubles Here, a two-person exhibition with Karolina Żądło at GNYP Gallery in Berlin. Her work has also been presented at Double Q Gallery in Hong Kong.

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