Marta Nadolle

Visual artist, painter, photographer, author of installations and films. Born in 1989, Nadolle studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and Warsaw, where she received her diploma in Jarosław Modzelewski’s studio in 2014. She lives and works in Warsaw.

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Marta Nadolle, photo: ⓒ POLITYKA / Leszek Zych

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Marta Nadolle comes from Międzychód, a small town in Greater Poland, from which she moved permanently to Warsaw. The biographical context is crucial to her work, although in Nadolle’s case this does not mean narrating pivotal, particularly significant events in her life, but on the contrary, ordinary, everyday experiences and emotions, longing and loneliness, infatuations and disappointments.

She made her debut with a solo exhibition entitled And I Like You Anyway at the Promocyjna Gallery in 2015. Already at this stage, the themes of her works revolved around the artist’s private life and memories, relationships with loved ones and the emotions accompanying them. As she herself declared: ‘In my works I never go beyond personal experiences. I record all emotions and reactions to the surrounding reality’. At the same time, the painter’s formal explorations were evident. In some paintings, the background is practically absent, the figures are marked with a thin, broken outline and painted with broad strokes, and their faces are sometimes collaged and pasted onto the canvas and underlined with photographic inserts. At other times, the whole work is painted quickly and sketchily, with interiors, furniture and the figures themselves marked with a few brushstrokes, simplified as in children’s drawings.

Over time, a second type of stylisation began to dominate the artist’s work – albeit more ‘smoothed out’, closer to realism. Figures become small characters in meticulously sketched interior or street settings. Nadolle uses simplified forms, conventional perspective and expressive colours that define the emotional tone. The landscape is therefore always to some extent an interior landscape in her works. On her canvases, as if in comic-book panels, the artist often includes the titles of her paintings, which are usually statements by one of the characters in the scene. This formal language brings to mind, among others, the early works of Marcin Maciejowski, the paintings of Edward Dwurnik and folk art, which Nadolle has been inspired by for years.

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Marta Nadolle, 'You’re too hard-working to be on the left. You’re too much of a good lad to be on the right', 2022, photo: Bartosz Górka/LETO Gallery

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The use of visual language derived from folk art to tell the story of the painter’s life corresponds with the content of the paintings, which often comment on how the artist’s loved ones functioned in the gap between the capital and her home town. We see the mother uttering the classic line: ‘So tell us, how’s Warsaw?’ or the artist herself, who in a conversation with friends states: ‘I miss it, but I live here because there are opportunities’. In Nadolle’s paintings, Warsaw itself is also tamed in its own way by the quasi-folk stylisation. Even parts of the city centre, such as Krakowskie Przedmieście, bathed in sunset rays and through which a lone bus glides in the painting It’s Been 2 Years (2020), are more reminiscent of the sleepy towns in Nikifor’s paintings than of the actual city full of passers-by, tourists, cars and electric scooters. As Sebastian Gawłowski wrote, juxtaposing the traditions of veduta and folk art, Nadolle ‘transcends the division between centre and periphery, public and private, where metropolitan narratives merge with intimate handicrafts and folklore’.

Stories about unsuccessful parties, doctor’s appointments or disappointments with boyfriends met on Tinder, scenes of work, shopping, sex and thousands of small everyday activities relate directly to the artist’s own experiences, but also have a universal dimension, telling of experiences in which many people of her generation can see themselves, to a greater or lesser extent. Viewed from an outside perspective, the scenes of everyday life are reminiscent of stills from a television series, but Nadolle’s Warsaw does not resemble that of idealised television productions in which a modest flat means three rooms in an inner-city townhouse. Instead, the canvases show the artist bustling around in a cramped kitchen in an ordinary block of flats, or walking along a narrow pavement along a street thick with smoky cars as she carries bags stuffed with groceries from the shopping centre.

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Marta Nadolle, 'I paid for it myself', 2022, photo: Bartosz Górka/LETO Gallery

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Love relationships occupy a prominent place among the themes taken up by the artist. Exhibitions were built around them, for example Not Looking For Adventure at Leto Gallery (2019) and I’ll Send Him Nudes at Olsztyn’s Galeria Dobro (2021). What emerges from the collection of paintings on show is as much a chronicle of the relationships in which the artist has become entangled as a broader reflection on the factors that determine the shape of contemporary relationships. Nadolle looks at the conventions of flirting through dating apps, the stereotypes and gender patterns that condition relationship dynamics, the caution in talking about feelings and the casual ease with which nude photos are sent. There is also no shortage of surprises here – it turns out that after a series of disappointing conversations and encounters, it is possible not only to fulfil the dream of a romantic relationship, but even to build one between people with radically different political views.

Nadolle works primarily as a painter, although not always on canvas. As well as classical compositions, which are usually small in size, she also creates painted objects – she can use a piece of old, decayed plank of wood or a mannequin from a clothes shop found on a rubbish heap as a canvas. Sometimes she also uses sculpture, and in recent years she has turned to textiles, creating embroidered and patchwork works.

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Marta Nadolle, 'If I hadn’t left here, I’d have had a husband and children long ago', 2020, photo: Bartosz Górka/LETO Gallery

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For Nadolle, art becomes a kind of visual diary, in which she not only describes everyday situations and experiences, but also reflects on ‘what if’. In her embroidered work If I Hadn't Left, I Would Have Had a Husband and Children a Long Time Ago (2020), the artist once again returns her thoughts to her hometown, referring to the social conditions, expectations and roles determined by the given environment. However, Nadolle leaves room for ambiguity – the picture-postcard idyllic setting with a swan gliding across the river is also a kind of unfulfilled fantasy of petit-bourgeois stability. Thus, instead of a simple story of class advancement and escape from the clutches of patriarchal patterns, the artist spreads a funny-melancholic fantasy, aware that going to the capital to advance one’s career is a path with many limitations of its own, not least related to the precarious professional situation.

Since the beginning of her career, Nadolle has also devoted herself to teaching. At first, for pragmatic reasons, in order to ensure her financial security, she started teaching art classes for children at the WSM Żoliborz Centralny housing cooperative. As she recounted in an interview with Basia Czyżewska for Vogue magazine, her mission in working with children is to ‘sensitise, open up, embolden’. ‘My method is to make kids try many styles and show that there are many roads. [...] The biggest success is to get them not to draw from a photo and put down their phones. In fine arts, tutorials and simple answers don’t work’ – she reported. Between 2014 and 2018, she was an assistant at the Studio of Art in Public Space led by Mirosław Duchowski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and organised exhibitions at Gallery A19 at Marymont metro station. She currently teaches painting at the Atelier Foundation, founded by Teresa Starzec and Andrzej Bielawski in the early 1990s, and collaborates with the Leto Gallery in Warsaw. Nadolle was also the winner of the 2023 Polityka Passport in the Visual Arts category.

Selected solo exhibitions:

2022 – Don’t Worry, Leto Gallery, Warsaw.

2021 – I’ll Send Him Nudes, Dobro Gallery, Olsztyn;

2021 – Pathway to Happiness, Razem Pamoja Foundation, Kraków, 2021.

2019 – Not Looking For Adventure, Leto Gallery, Warsaw.

2016 – It Will Be Fine, Wystawa Gallery, Warsaw.

2015 – And I Like You Anyway, Promocyjna Gallery, Warsaw.

Selected group exhibitions:

2023 – Born in Hameryka, Salon Akademii Gallery, Warsaw.

2022 – Space to Share, Polish Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia;

2022 – Plavalaguna, Leto Gallery, Warsaw.

2021 – Invisible: Stories of Warsaw Servants, Museum of Warsaw;

2021 – M jak Młodość (Y as in Youth), State Art Gallery, Sopot;

2021 – With Pleasure, Szara Gallery, Katowice.

2019 – Paint Means Blood, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw;

2019 – 11th Triennial of Small Painting Forms, Wozownia Art Gallery, Toruń.

2018 – Communication With All That Is, Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw.

2017 – Loneliness is an Illusion, LATARKA Gallery, Budapest, Hungary.

2016 – I Think About You All the Time, Gallery A19, Warsaw;

2016 – New Image, BWA, Gorzów Wielkopolski.

21st century painting