Zuza Dolega

Zuza Dolega (Zuzanna Seweryna Dolega, born 1990 in Gdynia) is a visual artist and Doctor of Arts, living and working in Gdynia. She is a graduate of the Painting Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where she currently works as an assistant professor. In 2022, she defended her doctoral dissertation titled “The Tender Reader, The Tender Reader of Reality. In Search of Co-Feeling,” which marks a significant direction in her artistic research.She has participated in numerous exhibitions and artistic-research projects at both national and international levels. Her works have been exhibited and are held in collections in countries including Poland, Germany, Denmark, North Macedonia, Turkey, Tunisia, Japan, China, Australia, Argentina, and Ecuador. She is a member of the prestigious international association of paper artists, IAPMA. She has received multiple scholarships and awards, including the City of Gdańsk Award for Young Creators in Culture (2020) and the Paper Positions Berlin 2025 award for best paper artist.

Dolega’s practice develops around the concepts of tenderness, co-feeling (empathy), and attentive reading and recording of reality. She works across a wide range of media: from drawing, collage, and concrete poetry, through fiber art and small-scale weaving, to site-specific installations and analog projections. Her works often engage in dialogue with space, while light and shadow become equally important compositional elements, deepening the viewer’s perceptual experience.

A central aspect of her practice is pyrography, which she has been developing consistently since 2012 as one of the few artists in Poland working with this technique in a conceptual way. In Dolega’s approach, pyrography becomes a tool for examining the relationship between matter and trace, sign and meaning. The act of burning is irreversible, and fire becomes a co-creator, intervening in the structure of the material and transforming it. Thus, the trace—the drawing—is not created on the surface, but deeply within it, as a record of energy, time, and the intensity of gesture.

Burning, scorching, darkening, charring—these subtle differences in temperature and pressure create a tonal scale that is both visual and affective. Fire becomes an ambivalent medium: at once destructive and purifying, painful and tender, oppressive and protective. In the context of her work, pyrography can be read as a material metaphor for experience—the trace left by lived experience alters the structure of the subject.

Dolega combines burned drawing with paper, fabric, wood, and space, creating installations in which the delicacy of materials contrasts—at times—with the radicality of fire as a gesture. Monumental cut-outs, collages, and works inspired by asemic writing, blackout poetry, and redacted poetry develop themes of reading and obscuring—revealing and extracting meaning through partial erasure. Her artistic research remains in dialogue with neuroaesthetics and the concept of synesthesia, exploring how image, text, and matter activate perceptual and emotional processes.

Dolega’s work can be interpreted as an attempt to develop a visual “language of co-feeling”—one that does not impose a narrative but initiates a relationship. Her works do not so much represent reality as create conditions for its attentive, tender experience.