Katarzyna Baldyga

Katarzyna Baldyga is a painter born in Silesia, Poland, who has lived in the Netherlands since 2018. She graduated from the DOGtime Expanded Painting program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2024. As a member of the OFFO artist collective, founded in 2020, Baldyga has participated in numerous exhibitions, including OFFO Online (2020), ISO, Amsterdam (2021), Haagsche Koopjes, Den Haag (2022), Si. Si. Spex. #12 and #13, Amsterdam (2022 and 2023), and We are Already Gone, Amsterdam (2022).

Her artistic journey includes a stay in Leipzig, where she immersed herself in the New Leipzig School’s painterly environment, culminating in a group exhibition at HGB, Leipzig (2023). Additionally, she worked as a sculptor’s assistant for Merijn Bolink. Baldyga currently resides and works in Amsterdam, where she continues to develop her innovative approach to painting.

For Best of Graduates 2024, Katarzyna Baldyga presents a series of abstract paintings she poetically describes as transformations. Her work is characterized by a dynamic process that involves painting, printing, and repainting, often flipping the canvas between upright and upside down. Baldyga’s approach is rooted in spontaneity, where each mark leads to a reaction, creating moments of revelation. This method embraces the fluidity and unpredictability of paint, allowing the medium to dictate the outcome. Her large-format canvases enable her to explore relationships between parts and wholes, resulting in works that straddle reality and illusion, simplicity and complexity.

Katarzyna Baldyga is winner of the Ron Mandos Young Blood Award 2024.