Ewelina Dobroń-Wylężek

Ewelina Dobroń-Wylężek is a visual artist and art historian. She graduated in art history from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and received her doctoral degree in the discipline of fine arts and art conservation. She combines painting practice with research experience and academic work. Her knowledge of the history of painting, architecture, and culture is not merely a theoretical background to her work — it is transformed and translated into the language of the image.

Her artistic path has led from more representational painting toward a gradual loosening of form and the search for her own mode of representation. An important moment was her departure from the role of the painter as a reproducer of reality and a conscious shift of attention toward what remains of reality in memory: a fragment, light, color, rhythm, and the atmosphere of a place. In her earlier texts, Ewelina Dobroń-Wylężek described this process as a transition from knowledge and realist quotation toward “seeking an impression in art.”

Real places often serve as the starting point for her paintings — Italian cities, historic architecture, port spaces, ruins, domes and minarets, the landscape of the South, and experiences of travel. They are not, however, reproduced in a documentary manner. Over time, the actual view loses its sharpness, while memory retains only selected fragments. Harsh light dissolves contours, and mist becomes a metaphor for time, which blurs memories and lends color an unreal quality.

Ewelina Dobroń-Wylężek’s current painting develops at the boundary between recognizability and suggestion. She simplifies and synthesizes forms while retaining their visual suggestiveness. As she wrote in the conclusion of her doctoral dissertation, paintings are for her “fragments of places encoded in memory, captured emotions and impressions,” while the realistic landscape is transformed into “a colorful narrative veiled in the mist of time.” What remains important is to hold the image at the point where the viewer can still recognize the source of the representation, yet is already able to engage their own imagination.

The doctoral series Journey – Light – Mist emerged from this area of exploration and was further developed through subsequent themes: Italia Mentale, Roma Sparita, and Echoes of the Orient. They are connected by an interest in the memory of place, architecture, light, and the process of gradually distancing the image from its original, real source.

For Ewelina Dobroń-Wylężek, painting remains a process of searching — a way of building her own language between an engagement with historical art and the contemporary image, between observation and memory, between what is real and what imagination preserves over time.

Ewelina Dobroń-Wylężek is a member of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers (ZPAP). Her exhibition record includes solo exhibitions and participation in group exhibitions in Poland and abroad. Her works are held in private collections in Poland and internationally.