Malta-based Polish artist Wioletta Kulewska has just unveiled her new exhibition, Embedded, at the Malta Society of Arts. Here she talks Jo Caruana through her inspiration behind this very special selection of abstract, biomorphic paintings.

Combining the mystery and intrigue of ancient fossils with the beauty of oils and gold leaf, comes a new exhibition by Wioletta Kulewska, a Polish artist who has been living and working in Valletta since 2008.

Blue - Composition I, oil paint and charcoal on canvas.

Kulewska started painting at a community arts centre in Poland when she was just 10. As a very shy child, she found serenity in painting and chose to develop her artistic education at the Polish High School of Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts.

“In Poland, culture and the arts play a fundamental role and helped us to survive the worst moments in our history,” she says. “People like me who trained at the Polish School of Fine Arts all started our careers as colourists following on from the Capist and Fauvism aesthetics in painting. However, we were also strongly influenced by artists like Władysław Strzemiński, who not only helped to transform so-called high art – like painting, sculpture and architecture – but also transformed broadly-understood design.”

As her latest project, Kulewska is proud to present Embedded, a project developed during her Painting in Contemporary Art practice at the Slade School of Fine Arts last summer. She then took the project into her studio and found it to be a long and challenging process, within which she ended up crafting sculptures to recreate the elemental process of fossilisation, before working on print reliefs and paintings.

“As a result of this project I have almost become a palaeontologist,” the artist quips, explaining that the marine fossil that inspired the exhibition was discovered, evaluated, recorded and then taken back to the studio for further investigation.

“I have been fascinated with marine fossils for many years. I have made many sketches, studies and photographs of them. When you walk around Malta, you find all sorts of beautiful and well-preserved fossils imprinted on the rock layers. When you look at them closely, this preserved evidence of ancient life becomes your world for a moment. They were also living organisms once upon a time, so I have decided to study them closely and to give them a new life and meaning. I hope my audience will appreciate their beauty through these paintings but also hope they will reflect on subjects like embodiment, resemblance and disappearance.”

In Poland, culture and the arts play a fundamental role and helped us to survive the worst moments in our history

Embedded is made up of a number of smaller and larger scale paintings in oil with the use of gold leaf. It also presents a technique of printing plaster sculpture applied directly onto the canvas, wherein the artist is trying to recreate the elemental process of fossilisation. It is curated by Sandra Zaffarese.  

“In fine art, the term ‘biomorphic abstraction’ actually describes the use of rounded abstract forms based on those found in nature. Biomorphic comes from combining the Greek words bios, meaning life, and morphe, meaning form. The term came into use around the 1930s to describe the imagery in the more abstract types of surrealist painting and sculpture particularly in the work of Joan Miró, and the British sculptors Barbara Hepworth or Louise Bourgeois,” the artist continues.

Untitled, no.3-6, oil paint and 22K Gold leaf on board.

“I hope people will look at every painting in this show individually, even though it is a series. Each of them tells a story. I personally find them very feminine just like marine fossils themselves – brittle, unbreakable, timeless. It reminds me of the beautiful painting by Sandro Botticelli Birth of Venus, where a nude Venus stands inside a giant clam shell.”

Kulewska says she chose to hold Embedded within the Malta Society of Arts’ recently unveiled and refurbished galleries upstairs at Palazzo de la Salle, which she considers to be one of the most beautiful buildings in Valletta.

“I am thrilled to be exhibiting in Malta’s oldest institution for the promotion for arts and crafts,” she says.

“I considered the space I was going to use in great detail and these galleries became my dream location. In fact, as my paintings have so many hidden layers, I found Palazzo de la Salle to be the perfect place because of its rich history. The paintings I have created obviously have no words and don’t need an explanation to be understood. I want the audience to look at those paintings and find their own interpretation and answers. Work should have an independent life and work should tell us what to do. These paintings, although very contemporary, are deeply embedded in Maltese history just like a building itself.”

Embedded runs until March 1.

www.artsmalta.org