Bo Frej

I am an artist and illustrator based between Berlin and the South of France, working across painting, drawing, collage, mixed media and digital art. Born in Kraków, I have lived and worked in Paris, Warsaw, Istanbul and the South of France – experiences that have left lasting traces in my visual language.

My work moves along the fine line between figurative and abstract art, inviting the viewer to their own interpretation. Each piece is handcrafted, original, signed and numbered.

Art is the only language in which I truly speak freely. In everyday life I tend to be reserved – but in my work, I show everything. Every piece is a reaction to the world outside and at the same time an expression of what I feel inside at that moment.

My work is characterized by bold graphic reduction, expressive line work, and a playful yet pointed use of color and composition — drawing equally from pop art, surrealism, and the visual language of fashion and identity.

I am currently working on a new series, "Disconnected from Myself" — self-portraits stripped down to stark black and white, pushed until the image feels less like a photograph and more like a mask I happen to be wearing. Underneath all that stripping away, something stays untouched — a w...

Self-taught artist, no formal art school training.
I never trained as an artist — I taught myself, piece by piece, the way you learn a language you need to survive. Maybe that's why my work keeps returning to fragments: faces torn apart and put back together slightly wrong, features isolated on empty white paper, a mouth without the rest of the story. "Silenced" feels close to something I've lived, not just made — the sense of being fully present somewhere and still not quite heard, not quite seen as whole. In "Who?" and "Layered," I don't try to hide the cracks between the pieces; I leave them visible, because that's where the actual question lives — what's missing, what got left out, what never made it into words. I work mostly with paper, scissors, ink — simple materials for a question that isn't simple at all: who is allowed to be seen, and who has to stay quiet?

1999–2002 — Private art presentations for the international scholarly community, Warsaw, Poland
2002–2006 — Private art presentations for the international scholarly community, Paris, France
2006–2009 — Private art presentations for the international scholarly community, Warsaw, Poland
2009–2015 — Private art presentations for the international scholarly community, Istanbul, Turkey
2026 — Selected for the 25th Venice International Art Fair (VIAF), LIQUID ROOMS section, ITSLIQUID Group