/ABOUT ME/

It is never possible to separate the life and works of an artist: one reflects the other in an ever fascinating play of cross-references and reminiscences that, depending on the artist’s inclinations and style, emerge in different forms and ways.

In the case of Katarzyna Bak, the social and cultural contrasts of her homeland, Poland, combined with the vital, hostile and majestic power of the nature of the place, have played a fundamental role in achieving the intense and synthetic expressive force that characterises her painting style. The artist states ‘(…) the nature and forms of the landscape that accompanied my early years, the nature I breathed in, would later prove to be one of my most powerful sources of inspiration’.
It was already in these ‘early years’ that Katarzyna speaks of, the 1980s when she was a teenager, that her vocation and passion for art emerged, attending first the Art School and then the Faculty of Art Education in Czestochowa, where she had the opportunity to study and practice painting, drawing, photography and printmaking. Her university experience heightened her artistic awareness, which resulted in a cycle of lithographs she designed and produced, under the guidance of the artist Prof. Grzegorz Banaszkiewicz, entitled ‘Life and Death’.

Thanks to her mastery of techniques, Katarzyna Bak develops her own personal distinctive stylistic trait, recognisable in both figurative and more conceptual works: an energetic gesture that immediately translates into a mark on the canvas, capable of conceptual works: an energetic gesture that immediately translates into a mark on the canvas, capable of capturing and crystallising that which by its nature is constantly changing and which the eye, alone, is unable to grasp: a sensation, a body, a feeling, nature and its atmospheric phenomena.
The themes that the artist has investigated and brought together in cycles of paintings and drawings, in their variety, are starting points, springboards from which reflections on universal conditions take their impetus. The artist does not seek a faithful representation of the subject, the observer’s attention is not captured by the individual details that make up the work: through a work of synthesis, simplification and distillation of the image, what remains is its essence, thus becoming symbolic and universal.

After graduation she moved to Italy, where she works as a multidisciplinary artist. She usually presents work through installations, painting, drawing, and digital media, photography and performance.
Since 1996 very active professionally, she has exhibited in Poland, Belgium, Spain, Germany, England, Malta and Italy.

Artist Katarzyna Bąk explores the representation of a world in perennial metamorphosis by combining opposing forces in precarious balance, which manifest themselves through traits, shapes and colors that sometimes violently narrate the struggle of existence.
Katarzyna draws inspiration from the dialectic of the multiple and multiform components of nature, where the key to access is observation, her work is a work of meditation on the cycles and transformation of being in search of the invisible, the unspoken, of the unexpressed, hidden under the superfluous and unnecessary, the search for the harmonious alternation of sound and silence hidden by the buzz of the background noises of life, of the deconstruction of reality and of the consolidated.