Klaudia Krzysztonek

Born 1992, a Polish-born artist, Klaudia Krzysztonek casts light onto the dark fragments of her imagination. Trained at the School of Art in Zakopane, she also went to the Academy of Fine Art in Katowice. Krzysztonek has won multiple awards from the institutes where she was trained, including first and second place at “Student Painting of the Year”.

Krzysztonek focuses on what is absolute and what we often fail to acknowledge. She drifts her brushstrokes, on canvas, to capture the dark essence of the human psyche. The mechanisms behind a darker shade of our personality are defined by Krzysztonek in her work. Shadows that represent emotions and natural animalistic instincts and the taboo relating to our evolutionary state are untangled as she unabashedly expresses hidden psychic states. 

Repetitive lowkey backdrop identities her style, while she develops an impenetrable world of anxiety and suffocation. Apart from several sombre sentiments that become a central theme of her works, bewilderment, excitement, fear, etc tend to mark her manifestation vividly. Our animalistic instincts, which Krzysztonek portrays, often define our personalities that are suppressed in lieu of a socially accepted protocol that we’re expected to follow. Krzysztonek explores such innermost turbulences, accepting the socially dejected emotions.

Employing a part of the human figure as an aesthetic prop of her paintings, the melodrama unfolds with the yearn to visualise them in entirety. However, it is a worthy observation that the figures in her paintings are mere bodies and do intend to evoke any form of sexuality. This is because bodies represent humans universally, the problems she shares in her depictions aren’t related to a single individual and instead, we share collectively as a group. Her work has been part of various exhibitions around the world.

Klaudia Krzysztonek lives and works in Poland.