Marlena Szewczyk ( born 1997) is a Polish artist living and working in Katowice.
She graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Katowice in 2022 . Since then she has exhibited in a number of exhibitions and competitions in Poland.
Painting is the center of Marlena’s artistic expression, but she also created collages and drawings. Her paintings are mysterious as they depict peculiar characters, sometimes hybrid, sometimes complex to identify. In soft, pastel colours, the artist renders the unknown setting of these characters as they ponder or gaze directly at the viewer. They are observers. ‘They observe me just as I observe them,’ says the artist.
These creatures reoccur in her work and are strongly intertwined with the artist’s own experience.
The second important element in Marlene’s work is hair. In many cultures, hair motifs are associated with magic and spiritual development. For years, they have been an important element of self-presentation in both the human and animal worlds. Hair is the outer layer that stores emotions and also separates us in some way from our surroundings. Her paintings are also associated with coziness. The creatures in her paintings are looking for shelter. They wrapped themselves in fur, and from now on, they observe in silence the world from which they separated themselves.
Marlena’s painting characteristics resonate with surrealistic traits but in a very subtle way that makes the work uncanny.