Kamińska Kamila

Kamila Kamińska (b. 1996) is a visual artist and a graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2023), where she completed her diploma project titled Tissue of on Image. Her work focuses on redefining the status of painting—not as a medium that merely records reality, but as a form endowed with its own materiality and a nearly corporeal presence. In her practice, Kamińska intertwines reflections on the psyche, the experience of the body, and cultural codes associated with clothing, creating a language in which the image becomes a space of intense physical and emotional experience.

Drawing from personal experience, the artist engages with the fragility and limitations of the body, while avoiding literal representation. Instead, she constructs a tension between what is visible and what remains concealed. Her paintings do not depict the body directly; rather, they function as records of its memory. The surface of the canvas pulses like living tissue—dense, wounded, and marked by traces of intervention. Scars, cuts, and lines are not merely formal gestures but carriers of experience: imprints of time, pain, and transformation. In this sense, Kamińska’s painting becomes a meditation on the coexistence of life and death, intertwined within a single, continuously renewing matter.

An essential aspect of her practice is her engagement with scale and the relationship between the artwork and space. Kamińska conceives her works in relation to architecture—as forms that not only exist within space but actively shape and transform it. The scale of her works directly influences their reception, engaging the viewer’s body and drawing it into an immediate, almost physical experience. The painting ceases to function as an autonomous object hanging on a wall and instead becomes an environment through which the viewer moves.

A important element of her practice is the understanding of canvas as skin, a surface upon which psychological and emotional tensions become visible. The artist treats the image as a living process, aligned with the rhythm of the body, which does not allow for forgetting but constantly recalls and transforms experience. Her works oscillate between abstraction and figuration, balancing between what is representable and what remains elusive. Fragments suggestive of wounded skin coexist with the intense, almost organic materiality of color.

 Alongside painting, Kamińska develops painterly objects made from raw linen fabric shaped into forms resembling garments. In these works, the image exists through material—without it, it cannot come into being. Clothing, as a “second skin,” becomes a carrier of identity, a tangible biography of both individual and collective experience, and a tool for reflecting on the relationship between body and culture. In this way, the artist engages with anthropological and psychological dimensions, constructing a multilayered narrative about the human condition.

Kamińska’s creative process is deeply physical and intuitive. It begins with raw linen canvas, whose structure and weave are carefully selected for each work. She then intervenes in the material—cutting, stitching, and stretching it onto the frame—treating these actions as integral to the painterly gesture. She works with traditional tempera technique, remaining in  dialogue with the history of painting while consistently forging her own independent path, rooted in a contemporary experience of corporeality and presence.

Her works are included in the collection of mBank, donated to the National Museum in Gdańsk, the BEC Poland collection, as well as in private collections.