"Untitled" Painting

Magdalena Gluszak-Holeksa is a Polish artist, who lives and works in the UK. She grew up in the Silesian Beskids mountain range in the South of Poland. Throughout her practice, she uses her changing memories of the landscape surrounding her home as a metaphor to explore concepts of metamorphosis and the symbiotic exchange between the dead and living matter. At the core of her process lies her deep interest in psychology and how our inherited belief systems and emotions form a non-verbal language within our unconscious, influencing our perception of the self and the sense of our belonging. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London (2019) and a BA (Hons) in Photography from the Arts University Bournemouth (2014). She is a Fellow at Digswell Arts Trust, where she works from her studio at the Forge, Welwyn North.


"Through painting, I search for a language to explore impermanence and the body’s relationship with the nonmaterial. The process of transforming and revealing through painting is an enquiry into symbols of the non-physical and extensions of the visible. Shifting between awareness and the subconscious, I wrestle with memories that slip my control and with knowledge that seems to exist beyond the reach of my senses.

I’m drawn to limited, cool colour palettes which echo the nocturnal moods of the natural environment where I grew up. My compositions merge elements of the natural environment, everyday objects, interiors and body details, retaining traces of personal photography, family albums and found images. I allow these documented moments to collide with inner experiences. Placed within dim ambiguous settings, shadows and lights punctuate these constructed scenes, which I explore as elements that intrude, burn out and disguise. The boundaries and structures of form become fluid, mirroring the weight and movement of thoughts: petals detach and float, materials expand or liquify and walls evaporate, leading me into uncanny moments caught in-between landscape and still-life. Painting is a means to navigate through and dismantle the input I absorb from images until it becomes porous, alluding to a new kind of knowing.

​By entering these familiar memory landscapes, I allow for a non-human language to soften the edges of my perception. This longing for the hidden is rooted in the view and shape of a mountain – the static anchor - from which I am exploring the hierarchies of the outer and inner realms.