Ella Kolanowska

Ella Kolanowska is a Philadelphia-based Polish-born visual artist whose work unfolds at the intersection of abstraction, materiality, and the psychological realm. With an MFA from the University of Arts in Poznań and a lifelong dialogue between art and inner inquiry, she creates paintings that serve as quiet spaces for emotional resonance, spiritual reflection, and transformation.

Drawing on both her formal training and intuitive practice, Kolanowska approaches painting as a living process — one that is less about construction than about revealing what already exists beneath the surface. Her works often emerge slowly, through a rhythm of small gestures: single dots of pigment, layered transparencies, hand-sewn threads, and the soft resistance of fabric. These micro-interventions accumulate into compositions that feel more listened to than planned.

Many of her recent pieces feature semi-transparent grounds through which light filters like memory. Across these surfaces, she places crocheted shapes, fine stitches, and layers of pigment, often in tension — between precision and blur, softness and gravity, body and void.
In some works, two opposing forms — curved, vessel-like, or hemispheric — face each other across a central line, se...

Academi of Fine Art in Poznan, Poland