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Katarzyna Szeszycka (1983- ), an interdisciplinary artist who creates artistic events in urban space, grew up in a forester's lodge in a small rural community, close to nature, which undoubtedly influenced her sense of feeling and resonates in her work. Since the beginning of her artistic career, when she was a student at the University of Poznan, she has practised both painting - which, in her own words, is "a notation of authentic experiences, emotions" - and rebellious acts, which stem from the need to criticise consumer capitalism. In her early works, Szeszycka focused more on the cultural context of a given place, the landscape and people, the formation of identity or human-animal relationships. Over time, her paintings evolved towards minimalism, abstraction and almost monochrome painting. The series of paintings are accompanied by photographs, videos and intermedia objects. The artist uses them to experiment by exploring and analysing the limits of visibility, the polysensory perception of space in relation to the other senses. Despite their ascetic, minimalist form, the works in the Learning to Swim series contain an element of movement, a statement of human presence. In other works, such as Empty Landscapes and Devoid, humans are not absent, but we see only the places they have left, which are most likely to be reclaimed by nature. Katarzyna Szeszycka graduated from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 2015 with a thesis on the perception of dim light and the execution of bio-art: the cultivation of white plants. She is the winner of the Grand Prix of the 24. Festival of Polish Contemporary Painting in Szczecin (2012). She participated in the first edition of the Artist in Residence programme as part of the Artist in Aso project (Japan, 2014) and has also been a resident in several other projects: Focus+Indonesia (Indonesia, 2014), New Dictionary of Old Ideas (Hungary, 2018). She is a co-founder of the Upside Art Foundation and the FREEDOM Gallery in Szczecin. The artist is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Szczecin. Marlena Chybowska-Butler