Born in 1992 in Bielsko-Biała, in southern Poland, Karolina Orzełek is a Polish painter who lives and works in Paris. She moved to France in 2011 to study at Beaux-Arts de Paris. After graduating in 2016, she participated in various solo and group exhibitions in France, Germany and Switzerland among others. In 2020, she won the first Sisley - Beaux-Arts de Paris prize for Young Creators. Her paintings can be found in collections in France and around Europe.

 

Her works invite the viewer into a world in which the lines between reality, fantasy, memory and dreams are constantly moving and never quite defined. Each of her paintings is carefully constructed - from the composition, created by mixing different photographic sources from her personal archives, through the choice of colors that set the mood and focus of the depicted scene, until the stage of painting itself, playing with the medium and the characteristics of the wooden support.

 

Through the prism of her colours, the reality appears enhanced by a solarisation. Inspired by magical realism, literature, cinema, mythologies and popular beliefs, her paintings invite us on a journey to out of time places which offer both a cosy refuge and a moment of uneasy questioning. They offer a panorama of suspended, frozen moments, imbued with the atmosphere of the afterwards - which emphisize the discrepancy between their onirism and almost apocalyptical aspect.