Patryk Różycki

Visual artist, painter, performer, author of texts and podcasts. Curator of several editions of the Kick Off Perfo performance festival and the Baza experimental short film festival. Born in 1992, Różycki lives and works in Warsaw.

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Patryk Różycki, photo: Leszek Zych / Polityka

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Originally from Koło, Patryk Różycki studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, from which he graduated in 2017. Initially, performative actions occupied an important place in his practice, but over time images became the main tool of expression for Różycki.

His painting is extremely personal, even confessional, telling of emotional, difficult, sometimes even traumatic moments. Formally, Różycki balances between simplified realism and expressive stylisation – he uses dramatic foreshortening and distortions reminiscent of the photographic fisheye effect, bright colours and strong chiaroscuro, he marks faces and silhouettes with expressive, short brush strokes. He transfers onto canvases and dissects not only the current events in his life, when their trace in his memory and emotions is still vivid, but also goes back to past experiences and situations that have somehow imprinted themselves on his psyche, trying to recover memories that have been repressed and those he has been told to forget. By reconstructing these stories, he puts himself in the perspective of a witness observing himself from the past, even now distant situations from his childhood being presented as evocatively as stories from a few weeks ago.

This detailed realism with regard to memories from long ago may bring to mind Karl Ove Knausgård’s equally frank and richly detailed description of near and distant events and the feelings accompanying them from the pages of My Struggle – in both cases, the unusually vivid reconstructions of the past result not from photographic memory, but from the author’s ability to recreate his emotional states from a given moment. Różycki, however, goes a step further than the Norwegian writer in his deconstruction of social patterns of masculinity and class conditions – in this respect he is closer to the prose of Édouard Louis and the essayism of Didier Eribon. The polemic against a macho model of masculinity based on emotional indifference is a fundamental thread that binds together the artist’s work, from his early performances to his most recent paintings.

The confessional convention of Różycki’s paintings can be compared, for example, with the autobiographical nature of the paintings of Marta Nadolle, co-nominated for the 2023 Polityka Passports, but it is no coincidence that in the context of Różycki, associations from the field of literature mainly come to mind. For his paintings are literary on many levels – each time they tell a specific story, even if sometimes all we see is a piece of landscape (The House My Parents Were Going to Buy Before My Sister Died, Seen Through the Window from the Back Seat of a Polonez Caro, 2022). Although the people, objects and scenery are presented in a direct and legible way, the setting in a private biography demands to be further explained.

Różycki’s canvases therefore bear not only elaborate titles, which, as if in 19th-century history painting, explain directly what we are looking at (There Is a Man Threatening Us in the Car Park in Front of Polo Market, 2023), but also elaborate descriptions of the situation and the emotions accompanying it. At times, the title itself even turns into quite an elaborate story (I Met a Well-Known Gallerist: Our Conversation Lasted a Short Time and Ended When Someone Telephoned Him, I Was Then Left with a Feeling of My Own Strangeness, Stress and Awkwardness, Thinking About How Distanced I Was from Him by the Position He Holds and the Possible Impact on My Career, 2023). In doing so, the individual canvases are as much separate stories as they are fragments of a larger whole, a wide-ranging autobiographical and self-analytical project. A kind of natural extension of Różycki’s paintings is also his 2019 book Performatyka Demaskowania Siebie (Performatics of Unmasking Yourself), and a podcast hosted by the artist between 2021 and 2022.

Although Różycki’s paintings tell the story of himself, his family, friends or partners, what is at stake here is not so much – or not only – a diaristic description of his own life as a reflection on various conditions that determine this life. They reflect on models of masculinity deeply rooted in culture, on patterns of family and romantic relationships, on carnality, sexuality, class divisions and the exclusion they entail, and finally on power relations in the art world and the ways in which symbolic capital is distributed within it. The subjects of the paintings are sometimes particularly dramatic experiences that mark the history of the artist’s family, such as the death of his brother in a shipping container, but also minor moments of stress, embarrassment or shame, which to some extent have a universal dimension.

All these small moments, which most of us silence and suppress, Różycki meticulously records in his works. Significantly for his work, the description contained in the title sometimes not only adds to the representation, but also deconstructs it, as in the painting I Seem to Be Lying Here So Confident, and It Stresses Me Out That We Are About to Have Sex (2022). Unlike artists such as the aforementioned Marta Nadolle or Martyna Czech, Różycki thus seems to question the ability of the image itself to fully lift the mask and reveal its own emotions. At the same time, he does not abandon the visual in favour of literary description, thus bringing out the tension between the appearance of calm and inner turmoil. In the artist’s work, the image and the word thus function in a constant dialectical intertwining to fully express what they cannot capture on their own.

The subject of Różycki’s paintings sometimes becomes the paintings themselves, in a sense. Thus, the artist talks about how unhindered revealing of his life and the lives of his loved ones can affect them and make them feel uncomfortable, or about commercial success which is also followed by the thought of moving away from the family. In Różycki’s paintings, situations that he fantasises about are just as vivid as concrete memories. Painting thus becomes a space not only for analysing experienced situations, but also for visualising what seems impossible in real life (I Would Like to Cry Like That, to Be Able to Show Emotions Towards My Dad, 2022). As the artist said in an interview with Bogna Błażewicz: ‘It is actually the case that I think [...] about hugging my father, but I can’t do it either. I paint to build up courage, but first I build the ground for such a gesture. My family, my friends, will see the paintings and maybe then it will be easier for me, we will start talking’.

In terms of iconography, the painterly series presented by the Polana Institute gallery at the Far from the Road exhibition in Petrykozy stands out from the artist’s other works. Although staffage appears on some of them, Różycki redirects the attention primarily to the landscape. He paints the rural landscape in which he grew up and to which he returns when visiting his family, but also stills from films and television series, which to some extent have formatted his perception of the rural landscape. These images reflect both the artist’s personal perspective and a record of the socio-infrastructural changes of recent years. We see the abandoned ski jumps where Adam Małysz once won medals, an asparagus field in Germany where the artist’s sister used to go to work, newly erected noise barriers along a motorway and decaying bus stops – a sad monument to the progressive exclusion of smaller villages from transport.

In the most recent paintings presented at the exhibition, Our Son Paints Our Life, Różycki has gone yet another step beyond the story of his own experiences. Like the aforementioned Édouard Louis, who in his successive novels redirected his gaze from himself to his father and then his mother, Różycki remains within the circle of stories about his closest relatives, but goes beyond the situations of which he was the protagonist. He tries to look at his parents or siblings in situations known to him only indirectly, to reach deeper also into their feelings and what has shaped them. As he himself wrote on this occasion:

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I also wanted, by showing their difficult life stories, to return to reflect on the complexity of relationships in our society. For a long time, many issues, such as an inferior material situation, taboos related to the presence of alcohol in the family, my background, held me back in my adult life. Shifting the focus from me, my feelings, to my loved ones, their stories, helps to verify the remembered reality, helps me to mature.

A finalist of the Polityka Passports in 2023, he collaborates with the Polana Institute gallery.

In his solo exhibition My Girlfriend Is My Friend’s Girlfriend, presented at Polana Institute in the autumn of 2025, Różycki once again filled the gallery to capacity with dozens of works. This time, his paintings turned a lens on his relationship with his partner and her other partner. By chronicling moments that were trivial, banal, or utterly mundane, he raised questions about what is deemed worthy of artistic representation—and how art fundamentally alters categories such as honesty and directness.

The dense, salon-style hanging typical of his practice—evoking 19th-century salon displays—reveals a core narrative strategy: montage. Here, montage binds individual paintings into almost cinematic sequences, rendering the spaces between the canvases—and what the audience projects onto them—just as crucial as the imagery itself.

The widespread resonance of the show, even if sensational interest at times overshadowed artistic considerations, demonstrates that the idiom Różycki continues to develop retains a pull far beyond the typical gallery-going audience.

Różycki and his artistic ethos also served as the inspiration for Łukasz Ronduda’s film Tell Me What You Feel, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2026.