Starting from the 19th century, this space has been reclaimed by women artists in transformative ways, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Hilma Af Klint, and Agnes Pelton, who advocated for a special relationship between nature, the female body and their own desires. Fluidly oscillating between figuration and abstraction, Przyżycka’s spiritual and erotic paintings inevitably pay tribute to this lineage of artists while engendering new personal narratives. By fragmenting and reassembling body parts, her practice champions the female body as experimental landscape and reports her own experience of desire and oneness with nature in the age of technological (dis)connection.

Photography quietly underpins all of Przyżycka’s paintings. Having completed a PhD in Painting and Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Poland, Przyżycka starts her paintings with photographs of her kin and friends. These close-up shots help her capture the softness of the skin and the body’s voluptuous curves, bringing her closer to her own body. To eschew photography’s realism, she then cuts and dissects the photographs, re-puzzling them into collages of undulating shapes. These collages form the basis for her larger canvases and become artworks in their own right. “Photography is like an alphabet to my paintings, then arranged into words”, the artist posits. Like an alphabet, her photographs are black and white, while her canvases are baked in seductive sorbet-like colours that “come from my heart and nature.”