Visual Artist
Dorota Borowa is a Polish visual artist based in Dublin. Borowa received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Dorota has been awarded a number of Artist in Residence programmes (eg. Cill Rialaig Residency, The Mothership Project Satellite Residency, Can Serrat International Art Center). She has been recently awarded the Arctic Circle Residency where artists of all disciplines and scientists collectively explore the high-Arctic Svalbard Archipelago and Arctic Ocean. Borowa was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize as well as was shortlisted for the Bielska Jesien (Poland's most prestigious painting biennial). Her work has been supported by the South Dublin County Council as well as the Polish Ministry of Culture.
She is a workshop facilitator (eg, Science Gallery Bengaluru, India, children workshop at Tønsberg Library, Norway, Family Workshops at Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok, Poland).
Her paintings are included in the collection of the National Museum in Gdansk as well as private collections.
Dorota Borowa primarily works with painting, drawing, printmaking and video. Borowa renounced her own mark from the painting process to step outside her own subjectivity. Instead of painting nature, she wants to create with nature. 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.
Water shapes the surface of our planet, is transparent and vital for all lifeforms. Its ever-changing states and movement can reflect the temporality of life. Different states of water collected in various places have created a vocabulary in Dorota's work - be it rain, ice or seawater. In the act of assisting water in painting an image, rather than exerting total control - she mixes it with oil paint and turpentine, and occasionally ink to allow the materials to react organically. Personal loss instigated Borowa's experimentation with abstract images and the limiting of her colour palette to different shades of black. The unpredictability and limited control of Dorota's painting process make her works become a place between accident and design, between acceptance and destruction.
Examples of works (please navigate to ‘My work’ at the top of this page to see more images):
Ice Print (Black series) 3, 32x33.5cm, oil, Fabriano paper, ice, 2021
Ice Paintings 5 (series 1), 35x45cm, oil, board, melting ice made from Kenmare Bay sea water, 2020
Untitled 9 from the Rainy Paintings series, diameter 60cm, oil, board, rain in Kenmare, 12s, 2021
Bubble Drawing 1, bubble, ink, paper, 50x65cm, 2020
Present Tense, solo exhibition, m2 Gallery, Warsaw, 2017
Lunar, solo exhibition, Eight gallery, Dublin, 2015