ARTIST STATEMENT

Ephemeral and blurry recollections of landscapes drift into impressions and feelings. It’s these senses that I lyrically translate into visual forms of shape and colour. In the painting process I am after deep observation in order to distill and to describe the surrounding world with the least possible amount of visual elements. This decluttering is reflected in the minimal style and my reluctance towards narrativeness supported by a meticulous technique and original style.

Driven by some philosophical exploration of mechanisms of memory and dreams my technique strongly derives from my printmaking period with the concept of layering and blending colours whilst adding new dimensions. Because inks don’t leave any room for corrections I have to plan ahead next layers, which takes me through the whole process. Like dreams are illogical and scattered, my paintings are also quite surreal in that sense. Without a distinct perspective the elements seem to be shown from different angles and dimensions a bit collage-like. My art is on the verge of being purely abstract, but shows the root of inspiration in nature and therefore has the ability to lead the viewer’s way through it.

BIOGRAPHY

Gosia Poraj, born in 1982, now lives and works in London. Received Masters Degree in  2006 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice (Poland) specialising in printmaking.  

Throughout the years following her degree she focused on commercial graphic design but continued to work on coloured block printing alongside. After relocating to London she moved towards painting and exploring watercolour techniques.

Using a distinctive mark-making technique Gosia Poraj has developed very fresh and vivid visual language for her paintings. Balancing on the edge of abstract, her works reflect artist’s personal view of a landscape represented as various interactions of orderly and chaotic elements of nature. The shapes seem familiar to the viewer but are presented in a very simplified forms scattered between different perspectives, shown from different angles, constantly searching the harmony with vast emptiness of the paper.