Ben Kulagowski

Ben Kulagowski (born 2002) is an artist and architecture student currently studying a master’s degree. He works primarily in oil paint and has exhibited in galleries including the Royal Academy (2024). His practice explores flowers, foliage, water and reflection, focusing on the fleeting visual moments that often pass too quickly for the eye to fully experience.

Kulagowski is interested in capturing the instantaneous moment: water falling across a surface, a flower beginning to bloom, light bending through glass, or liquid distorting the natural forms behind it. Rather than painting a still life as something fixed and motionless, his work presents still life as active, fluid and alive. Flowers and plants become part of a larger visual event, where movement, reflection and distortion reshape the scene.

His paintings often combine delicate botanical subjects with glass-like streams of water, rippling surfaces and dense areas of foliage. Through this contrast, he creates compositions that feel both natural and heightened. The softness of petals and leaves is placed alongside the sharpness of reflected light, creating a tension between calm beauty and sudden movement. In many of his works, water acts almost like a lens, bending and i...