Joanna Janowicz (b. 1985, Poznań) is a painter based in Warsaw. She completed postgraduate studies in painting at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts in Poznań and holds a PhD in Economics.
She works primarily in oil painting. Her practice moves between intuition and awareness, with each work developing gradually through a series of decisions and changes. She is interested in the tension between presence and its trace — what remains in gesture, colour, fragment, and memory.
I have always been slightly aside.
At once close and withdrawn, present and distant.
The position of an outsider and observer feels comfortable and safe. I watch people and events as if they were frames of an endless film, yet I am not indifferent to what I see and hear. Voices, dialogues, gestures — entire scenes — stay with me. At times, the ghosts of people and places feel more present than reality itself. Memory proves more durable than relationships, places, or emotions.
I need to pause, to remain in silence, and to fully register what is happening.
Painting is my way of dealing with life — of reconstructing what matters without fixing it into a clear narrative. Of holding on to what I cannot or do not want to forget.
I think of an image as a still frame: a suspended moment within a larger, unseen sequence. Something has already happened or is about to happen. The tension lies in the unknown.
I work both intuitively and consciously. I have a plan, but I remain open to what unfolds on the canvas and beyond my control.
Painting is a form of letting go — without resignation, but with care and attention.
