Katarzyna Kukuła

She is from Kolonia Cieśle and was born in 1987 in Katowice, studied painting at Cracow’s Academy of Fine Arts, diploma in 2012 supervised by Prof. Leszek Misiak. She deals in painting, drawing, artistic textile and animated film. She lives and works in Cracow and is a member of the Kuku Kuku group.

Katarzyna Kukuła creates her own world – intimate, erotic, with the obsessively used motif of the phallus, vagina and breasts. It is the world of a girl who has just discovered the supremacy of sexuality regulating interpersonal relationships. Pink, the colour she uses so profusely, is not a little girl’s favourite in her works. It has very specific, physiological connotations. The artist uses it deliberately, playing on its symbolic meaning. Her pictures are filled with hundreds of copulating people looking like insects observed by a scientist. It is like a contemporary version of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” – the land where even the landscape has erotic shapes. Such a sublimation of obsession is only possible in art, where the full arbitrariness of associations gives a sense of freedom.

Katarzyna Kukuła’s new works depart from pink eroticism, the sunshine land turns into darkness from which the only motifs to emerge refer to the pagan tradition of the Kupala Night. Painting is her main medium of expression, but the artist also takes advantage of textile and embroidery, using them to the best of her artistic purposes.   

 Agata Smalcerz