About

Dorota Borowa works across a range of media, including painting, printmaking, drawing, video, and, more recently, site-specific works. Rather than simply depicting nature, Borowa seeks to collaborate with it. In this way Dorota explores her own relationship with the natural world. The process itself is central to her inquiry, seeing it as a life lesson that teaches her humility, openness, attentiveness, mindfulness, patience, determination and forgiveness.

In the act of assisting water in painting an image, rather than exerting total control - she mixes it with oil paint, and occasionally ink to allow the materials to react organically. Different states of water collected in various places have created a vocabulary in her work - be it rain, ice, seawater and recently glacier water. To strengthen her collaboration with nature Borowa started preparing her own pigments and paints from locally sourced materials.

Personal loss instigated her experimentation with abstract images and the limiting of her colour palette to mostly different shades of black. The unpredictability and limited control of her painting process make my works become a place between accident and design, between acceptance and destruction. 

Dorota Borowa is a Polish artist based in Kerry, Ireland. She received her MFA from the Painting Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. Dorota exhibits both nationally and internationally (upcoming solo shows: Slendzinskich Art Gallery, Bialystok, Poland and Grilse Gallery, Killorglin, Ireland; group show: Sarah Walker Gallery, Castletownbere, Ireland) and has been awarded a number of Artist in Residence programmes (Arctic Circle Residency, PS², Belfast, Mothership Project Satellite Residency). To date Dorota has received bursaries from the South Dublin County Council (2019, 2021), Kerry County Council (2023) as well as twice from the Polish Ministry of Culture (2006, 2011). She was long-listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2016. Her paintings are in the collection of the National Museum in Gdansk in Poland. Her work has been selected for the second issue of Bloomers Magazine (cover artist).

Contact: d.borowa@gmail.com