POLISH / IRISH · BASED IN IRELAND

Katarzyna Gajewska

Katarzyna Gajewska is a Polish-Irish painter who works the surface of the canvas with the patience of a sculptor. Her portraits hover at the edge of legibility — features built up and worked back through layers of oil, pastel and dry pigment until faces emerge from the painting as much as they are painted onto it. Magenta, ochre, cerulean and bone-white collide in a register that owes something to Eastern European Expressionism and something to Irish weather. The result is a painted presence that refuses to settle into portraiture — it remains alive, exposed, still becoming.

Works by Katarzyna Gajewska

Bad Behaviour

80 × 60 cm

A blue-shadowed face caught between rage and tenderness — fields of cerulean and dirty rose worked through with pink, ochre and bruised red, features built up and scratched back until the portrait is half painted, half excavated.

€2,500

Elisabeth

100 × 80 cm

A close-eyed face surfacing through dark ground — earth-blacks and sepia worked over a pale luminous skin, the surface scored, scratched and accreted until the figure feels both ancient and immediate.

€4,000

Why of all things

100 × 80 cm

A face dissolving into its own painted weather — drifts of bone-white and ash-grey crossed by a hot crimson splash above, the figure both present and receding, a portrait of doubt.

€3,600