Name: Magdalena Kirklewska

Nationality: Polish

b. 1990

MAGDA KIRK (MAGDALENA KIRKLEWSKA) is a Polish artist (b.1990). She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts/ Painting Department in Gdańsk, Poland (2015). In her work, she focuses on the theme of body in the cultural and social context. She creates images of anonymous, incomplete bodies in a dreamy, blurry aura. Inspired by models, bodybuilders, and fictional characters such as superheroes, she plays with the cultural patterns of female and male body image and explores their impact on the ordinary, contemporary people’s identity, self-perception and self-expression. Putting together humour and horror, beauty and ugliness or cuteness and aggression, she shows the ambiguous emotions that accompany our intimate relationship with the body as a subject and object. She uses popular motifs and symbols from tattoo culture, trash graffiti, cartoons, and widely defined pop culture as a means of expression, often blending them in undetermined noise that forms the bodies’ flesh. The artist’s painting process is a meditation of putting multiple layers of color and airbrush doodles, which results in an impression of a luminous, unreal realism.