ALEKSANDRA KALISZ
Aleksandra Kalisz (b. 1992, Gdynia, Poland) is a painter and visual artist based in Porto, Portugal.
She holds a Master in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk (2016) and PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Porto (2025), where her research examined representations of femininity in contemporary visual arts. Her doctoral work adopted a multidisciplinary approach, combining psychology, art history, and cultural theory, with a focus on women’s rights, colonialism and post-colonialism, feminism and post-feminism, and anthropology.
Kalisz collaborates with various art and cultural magazines, contributing both visually and theoretically to ongoing discussions about gender, identity, and representation in art.
Her practice encompasses painting, drawing, installation, and textiles. Through these media, she explores themes of femininity and cultural symbolism. Influenced by Eastern and Western decorative traditions, her work investigates the relationship between body, pattern, and surface, employing line, colour, and form to reflect on identity, gender, and perception.
Kalisz has exhibited widely in Poland and internationally, with solo and group shows including Notions of Women (Porto, 2025), UN/COVERED (Centre of Contemporary Art, Torun, 2018), Act of Pattern (Gdansk, 2016), NordArt (Germany, 2017 & 2019), and Painting Today (European Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona, 2019). She has completed artist residencies in Portugal and Morocco, and her works are part of private and institutional collections, including the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun.
Her artistic achievements have been acknowledged with several awards, including a distinction at ModPortrait 2021, the Biafarin Award at NordArt 2019 and distinctions from the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun.
Artist statement
For me, painting is an ongoing exploration- a process of searching, questioning, and discovering. Each work starts with curiosity: the choice of subject, material, and technique becomes a path to deeper reflection. Every canvas presents a new beginning, a new challenge, and an opportunity to experiment or refine what has already been learned.
Painting is an exploration of colour, hue, and value- a quest for harmony between composition, line, and shape. It is a dialogue between control and intuition, order and emotion.
Ultimately, painting is an act of translation: transforming thought into form, emotion into colour, and observation into image. It is a space where research, intuition, and experience meet: a never-ending search for meaning through the language of paint.
ARTISTIC CV