When painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo portrayed figures made out of every objects, fruits, and vegetables, he presented the idea of life as living riddle or jigsaw puzzle. Living and working in Warsaw, Poland, Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak expresses a similar fascination with life in her paintings of figures in magical rearrangements. “My source of inspirations are fairy tales, dreams, my own experiences and stories from childhood,” she says. Working primarily in oil paint, her ongoing “The Still Life Series” depicts rainbow-colored visions of animals that are made out of materials.
Appearing to be woven out of thread and decorative fabrics, Ewa’s animals are a combination of still life, nature, and fantasy. They are an extension of her earlier works that featured portraits of women dissipating into a spectrum of ribbons and foliage. Her works employ intensely saturated colors that illustrate the vibrancy of the world that her characters inhabit: In one image, a fox leaps into mid air, his body dissolving to reveal a brightly colored rabbit inside of his stomach, leaping with him. In another, we can make out a starry sky between strips of fabric that make up a rabbit’s body. Rabbits, herons, foxes, deer, and even insects like honey bees and scorpions are all rendered in this surrealistic depiction of the artist’s imagination.
New York based artist