JOANNA WOYDA
NEW PAINTINGS
20 YEARS OF ARTISTIC CAREER

EXHIBITION 19 JUNE-11 JULY 2024
Gallery of Katarzyna Napiorkowska
Warsaw,  Świętokrzyska 32

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

Joanna Woyda (b. 1981) captures fleeting moments in her paintings. By stripping away unnecessary elements and reducing the backgrounds to abstraction, the artist encourages the viewer to focus on the depicted figures. In this way, she makes the landscape representations surreal while simultaneously showing great tenderness towards the characters. Woyda’s paintings encompass several series. The most important are the Beach and Warsaw cityscapes.
The Beach series has been ongoing since 2008 and includes several dozen canvases. They depict vast planes of blue. Against this backdrop, scenes that convey a sense of joy and tranquillity unfold. The painter documents human behaviours observed on the beach, such as ordinary gestures. She observes people walking alone, children playing, and dogs running. She captures them in motion and places them on an endless blue plane. Despite the lack of a defined space and the absence of any significant elements, it is immediately understandable that we are at the beach. It is a space that evokes a blissful sense of calm and rest – everything that the French call “agréable.”
The second theme in Joanna Woyda’s painting encompasses the architecture of Warsaw. The artist pays special attention to iconic 20th-century sites. It is often architecture that has undergone forces of transformation. Among the legendary buildings that shaped the city’s appearance is the Emilia pavilion building on Emilia Plater Street, whose glass and modern construction earned it the status of an icon of modern architecture. Her paintings also feature the Supersam department store’s undulating form or the cinemas Skarpa and Iluzjon’s architecture.
These are often representations with a sense of memory and tribute to the city’s changing face, as some paintings were created when modernist buildings were disappearing from Warsaw’s map.

JOANNA WOYDA (b. 1981) graduated with honours from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2005, studying in the painting studio of Professor Wiesław Szamborski, with an additional specialization in printmaking in the studio of Professor Rafał Strent. She received scholarships from the Minister of Culture and the BPH Bank and the Ewa Tomaszewska Award from the Presidium of the NSZZ Solidarność Trade Union. In 2014, she won the Grand Prix in a competition organized by the Franciszka Eibisch Foundation. She has participated in dozens of group and solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad (including Warsaw, Olkusz, Łódź, Legnica, Los Angeles, Kyiv, Brussels, St. Petersburg, and The Hague). Since graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Joanna Woyda has collaborated with the Katarzyna Napiórkowska Art Gallery in Warsaw and Brussels.

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PROFESSOR STANISŁAW BAJ:
„In Joanna Woyda’s paintings, large, flat, bright planes of color become the beach, water, and spacious sky. People appear in them, sometimes a few individuals, occasionally an embracing couple, but most often standing or playing children, which as a subject seem to be closest to the author’s heart. The depicted figures are in motion or standing still, freely incorporated into the canvases’ edges, but with enough certainty to reinforce the effect of the vast space.

Presumably, in painting these scenes, photo notes were used, thousands of which are taken, not to document phenomenal photoshoots but in admiration of the uniqueness of beach freedom when one has managed to break away from monotonous everyday life. The photographs here are transformed into a painterly language and emphasize vacation and beach scenes as the essence of this state of bliss, the essence of which is transience. The spatiality of colour, its luminosity harmoniously combined with a discreet narrative, builds a sense of solace and a mood that can delight, even purify. It is an innocent world, far from the hustle and bustle of everyday life, from its dirt, a pure world. There is discretion in this painting, unobtrusiveness, vitality, warmth, and above all, calmness and acceptance of order away from excess, an acceptance of oneself. One could say that this reconciliation with oneself is an essential source of this painting, the painting of Joanna Woyda.”
Professor Stanisław Baj

JOANNA WOYDA:
“This is an attempt to capture a moment from a special place to me – peaceful yet dynamic, allowing a person to be alone with themselves while simultaneously throwing them into a crowd of other beachgoers. A place where I become an observer of human behaviours, habits, and gestures while remaining one of the observed myself. (…)
It’s a peculiar place where we remain so small in relation to the vastness of the water, sky, and sand. A place where nature overwhelms us while at the same time giving us respite.
The beach gives me peace and doesn’t allow me to rush, much like painting.”
Joanna Woyda