Areta Puchalska

I am a visual artist and designer based in the Netherlands, with a background in scenography — the art of building worlds on stage. That practice never left me. It only changed its medium.

My paintings are sets for stories yet untold. Each figure inhabits a space I construct through color, mark, and atmosphere — dark backgrounds, heavy air, the physical weight of layered acrylic and oil pastels on black canvas. The scenographer in me thinks in environments; the painter populates them with faces.

These are portraits of people who do not yet exist.
They inhabit a world not of their own making — dense atmosphere, weight without source, only echoes of what we still move through lightly. Not heroes, but those who persist. Inspired by the endurance of northern peoples — Inuit, Icelanders, Yakuts — and filtered through an aesthetic drawn from Beksiński's unnamed catastrophes, the desolate sacred landscapes of Tarkovsky, and the quiet, unrelenting survival documented in Doris Lessing's "The Memoirs of a Survivor", these figures emerge from darkness not in defeat, but in presence.

They have not been born yet. Yet, they are coming.

Collegium Civitas | Neuromanagement | Neuromanagement | 2022-2023

University of Arts | Master of Arts (MA) | Set & Costume Design | 2010-2012

Université Rennes 2 | Fine Arts / Scenography | 2010-2011

Academy of Fine Arts | Bachelor's degree | Set & Costume Design | 2007-2010

Artur Grottger Visual Arts High School | 2003-2007