ARTIST STATEMENT
I remember being five years old, traveling with my parents on a night train from Warsaw to a coastal town by the Baltic Sea. We always had a sleeping compartment, and I loved waking up in the middle of the night when the train stopped. I’d pull back the curtain, curious to see where we were—a dark platform at a small, empty station. There was something thrilling in that stillness, in the way the unknown unfolded just beyond the glass. That feeling has never left me: a mix of anticipation and longing, a quiet pulse between movement and memory.
This sense of duality—light and shadow, clarity and mystery—runs through my work. I am drawn to how light shifts across landscapes, how colors dissolve and reform, how a fleeting moment can be both precise and infinite. Whether painting the rhythm of ocean waves, the contours of a face, or the silence of a place left behind, I seek to capture more than just what is seen. My paintings hold the energy of their own making—the push and pull of brushstrokes, the layers of color, the echoes of time spent with them.
Born in Poland in 1972, I studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw before settling in Germany, where I have lived and worked for over two decades. My journey as an artist is shaped by movement—across places, memories, and artistic forms. Rooted in the landscapes of my childhood, yet always drawn toward new horizons, I search for the fragile beauty within nature and life itself. Wide seascapes and intimate details, shifting light and lingering shadows—my work exists in the space where past and future meet, an invitation to pause, to see, to feel.
Artist Biography
Grażyna Ostrowska is a visual artist and painter whose work explores the intersections of nature, human connection, and storytelling through color and form. With a background in design and a deep passion for painting, her artistic practice spans landscapes, still life, and portraits.
Born 1972, she studied at the Academy of Arts in Warsaw, where she earned a Diploma in Product Design and a Master’s degree in Art. Since 2018, she has worked as an independent visual artist, establishing Atelier GO as her creative space. She was also a member of the Atelier Försterstraße collective in Cologne.
In 2024, she was awarded a grant from the Culture Moves Europe program by the Goethe-Institut for her project Drawing for the Ocean, developed in Peniche, Portugal. She has participated in international artist residencies, including Prisma Estudio in Lisbon (2024), and has exhibited her work in Portugal, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and France. Recent exhibitions include Tracing Light | A Luz da Lisboa (Prisma Estudio, 2024) and Faces & Flowers (KunstRoute Ehrenfeld, 2022).
Alongside painting, Ostrowska has an extensive background in illustration and is the founder of Illus-Icons-Infografiken, a studio specializing in visual storytelling and infographics.
Her current work is driven by a fascination with the rhythms of nature, the fluidity of memory, and the act of mapping places through artistic expression.