Potter's Wheel (2014) Painting by Martyna Benedyka

Martyna Benedyka, born in 1991 in Gdynia (near the Baltic Sea), is a Polish vocalist and visual artist working in several different media including painting, photography, collage, installation, video and sound art. She studied Art and Design at the Gray’s School of Art in Scotland, UK and graduated with a First Class BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art Painting in 2014. She has exhibited in the UK, Poland, Romania, Ireland, Switzerland, Canada and the USA. Her work has been chosen by the Federation of British Artists for the Futures - UK’s largest annual survey of emerging contemporary figurative art at the Mall Galleries, London, among others. She specializes in classical music and has performed in many group as well as solo concerts internationally.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

G . O ' K e e f f e

To me, the fact that no two photographic prints are ever exactly the same is a perfect analogy of how I view painting. Photography has taught me that memory is fragile and uncertain and through my painted surfaces memories are recorded and transformed. Modest in scale and subject, my paintings become fleeting moments of distorted reality.

Examining ideas of existence and being, I look for the essence of a person through the essence of an object. The camera becomes a link between an intense description of the world of things and my own response to it. My works are fragments that act like poetic signs; I would like to encourage people to slow down and to see the poetry of everyday life. Through the process of cumulative observation some of my favourite motifs are endlessly copied while others, once pushed to the edge, simply vanish. The diversity of my work unites the idea of looking behind what is seen, which is my main concern.

• Nationality: POLAND
• Date of birth : 1991
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Polish Artists