Artist Paulina Olowska: ”I Think Being an Artist Is Kind of Like Being a Medium.

Why It Matters

Her approach shows how artists can turn historic sites into community‑driven labs, preserving folklore while redefining exhibition models for sustainable cultural innovation.

Key Takeaways

• Artist sees her role as a medium channeling time's energy.
• Restored Kadenówka house becomes artistic sanctuary and experimental exhibition space.
• Explores Slavic rituals, goddesses, and folklore in contemporary performances.
• Uses 1960s Polish magazines to remix feminist and pop culture narratives.
• Emphasizes collaborative sharing over competition to expand artistic possibilities.

Summary

Polish artist Paulina Olowska describes her practice as a medium that senses the right moment and energy, while recounting her move to a small village and the restoration of the historic Kadenówka house into a creative sanctuary.

Olowska explains that Kadenówka, built in the 1930s by Adam Kaden, blends modernist Hutsulian‑Zakopane architecture with a 500‑square‑meter open plan, allowing artists to live, work, and exhibit outside metropolitan institutions. She links this shelter concept to her broader interest in Slavic rituals—Marzanna, Strzyga, Kikimora—and recent performances that revive these mythic figures.

She cites her early collage work from 1960s‑70s Polish women’s magazines, mixing propaganda, French fashion, and avant‑garde texts, as a prototype for her figurative paintings that blend optimism with hauntological themes. “Painting is alchemy,” she says, emphasizing the ritualistic act of creation.

Olowska argues that decentralized, collaborative spaces and the sharing of ideas can reshape the art ecosystem, offering a model where cultural heritage, feminist narratives, and experimental practice coexist beyond the competitive gallery circuit.

Original Description

”I think being an artist is kind of like being a medium. One has to feel and smell and sense the moment of time.” Polish artist Paulina Olowska’s work is shaped by local history, Slavic goddesses, and the environment surrounding her.

Paulina Olowska resides in a small village south of Krakow. A key part of her practice centres around an old house built in what is described as “modernist Hutsulian Zakopane style.” The house is from the 1930s and was built by a man of many virtues, Adam Kaden. It was made for rejuvenation, but also as a creative house. A legacy that Olowska carries on today: “By having this as an artistic experiment, to have artists also coming here, spending time between the in-betweens becomes very important,” she explains: “It’s also the idea that, should we, as artists, make our own exhibition spaces, our own museums? Can a museum be a shelter?”

“Slavicness came to me like a river. It just floated.” Many of Paulina Olowska’s works explore Slavic mythology and rituals. Living in the countryside exposed her to traditions such as the spring ritual of throwing the effigy of Morana, the goddess of winter, into a river. She started bringing the figures into her work “to research, to show the potential.” She says: “My characters or heroines had to deal with very specific virtues. There was like the representation as much as it is a historical aspect of women and their hidden knowledge.”

“Painting for me is really like alchemy.” Many of her early works were inspired by Polish women’s magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, which presented optimistic images of female life during the socialist period: “I guess I was looking for an archetype of a woman. I wanted to, in the times that there was hardly any painting, I wanted to work with painting, and I wanted to work with figure,” she says. “You let the painting do the work, and you flow with the painting. I think this is magic. I’m not going to talk grand ideas, but with art we can really, you know… I think that we can change a lot.”

Paulina Olowska (b. 1976, Gdansk, Poland) is an artist working across painting, performance, video and installation. Olowska received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, in 1996 and earned an MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Gdansk, Poland, in 2000. Olowska has presented solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel (2013); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013); Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway (2022); and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2023), among other locations. Group exhibitions including her work have been held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009); New Museum, New York (2011); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2017); mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2018); Tate Modern, London (2023); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023–24); Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2025); and the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2025), among other international institutions. Her work was featured in the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial in Melbourne (2017 and 2023) and the Liverpool Biennial (2018). In 2019, Olowska established Artist House KadenówkaFoundation, an ongoing project that hosts artist residencies and exhibitions.

Her work is held in major public institutions worldwide, including the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others.

Paulina Olowska was interviewed by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen at her artist house, Kadenowka in Rabka, Poland, in February 2026.

Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan

Produced and edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen

Copyright: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026

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