TANIA KANDRACIENKA

Painter,drawing lecturer, art curator

Tania Kandracienka (born 1980, Minsk) is a painter who has lived and worked in Warsaw since 2022.
She graduated from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts, where she studied painting between 1998 and 2004.

She later continued her education in the field of art theory and art history, earning a master’s degree (2008–2011).
From 2014 to 2020, she lectured in drawing at her alma mater. She has also been active as a curator and art critic.

Her works are held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Minsk, the Museo d’Arte in Deruta (Italy), and in private collections in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, and Belarus.

She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Berlin, London (Saatchi Gallery), Warsaw, Amsterdam, and Minsk.

Since moving to Poland, Tania Kandracienka has been consistently developing her artistic practice, combining solid academic training with her own distinctive painterly language.
In her work, she explores social and cultural themes, drawing on everyday observations of childhood and adolescence.
She transforms personal experiences and emotions into a universal narrative about human sensitivity and the need for authentic experience of the world.

Gallery Statement

Tania Kandracienka’s painting grows out of experiences shaped by the realities of contemporary Belarus. Her solid academic background — rooted in technical discipline and the classical school of drawing and painting — became the foundation on which she developed her own, independent artistic language. The tension between tradition and the desire to break free from imposed frameworks and narratives, as well as the need for sincerity and authentic expression, defines the axis of her artistic exploration.

Emigration became a catalyst for transformation. The necessity of leaving her country and rebuilding life from the ground up allowed her to view the past from a distance and gradually transform it through art. While her paintings contain no direct references to them, it is precisely those experiences that shape the emotional fabric of her art: a sensitivity to the fragility of existence, a sense of suspension, and of being “in between.” The expressive use of gesture and color gives her works a tangible sense of tension, weight, and depth. From this existential uncertainty — and from the pursuit of truth and sincerity — emerges Tania Kandracienka’s distinctive painterly language.

The central themes of Kandracienka’s work revolve around the experiences of childhood, youth, and growing up — symbolically understood as spaces of honesty and innocence, yet also of uncertainty and fragility. Seemingly simple scenes — children at play, in daily moments, or in relationships with peers — take on a universal dimension. They become a point of departure for reflections on human sensitivity, presence, and relationships with the surrounding world.

A return to the child’s perspective is not only a celebration of authenticity and the simplicity of perception. It is also an expression of longing for that original, unrestrained way of being that adulthood so often suppresses. It is, finally, a desire to preserve that inner space within oneself — a space where one can simply be, free from imposed roles, pressures, and social expectations.

Kandracienka’s painting does not describe directly but evokes moods, emotions, and meanings, creating a calm, intimate space, somewhat shielded from direct gaze. Figures in her works are often turned away, bent, or huddled — deprived of visual contact with the viewer. Yet this is not an act of withdrawal, but a form of protection against literalness, against a gaze that might too easily define or judge them. In this way, her scenes open a space of suggestion and inner tension, inviting the viewer to engage in a personal, attentive interpretation. The depictions of childlike joy and carefreeness carry within them a reflection on the fragility of human existence — particularly in a world full of tension and contradiction.

Emotion is also carried through formal means — the dynamic, broad painterly gesture, the thick, sometimes almost sculptural application of paint, and the bold juxtapositions of color that heighten the intensity of expression. Strong color contrasts sometimes order, and at other times destabilize, the pictorial space, giving it depth or drama.

It is within this tension that Tania Kandracienka’s creative process unfolds — grounded in intuition, impulse, and reflection. She paints quickly, with vigor, allowing emotion and gesture to guide the painting’s narrative. Then she pauses, to look with distance and submit her own decisions to quiet analysis. It is a moment to question them, to reconsider, to follow them — or sometimes to destroy what has already been created. This constant play between spontaneity and control, between certainty and doubt, becomes the essence of her artistic language. In her work, chance often becomes the source of new directions and discoveries. Every unforeseen gesture, every “mistake,” can become a turning point on the path toward the truth of the painting.

An important element of her creative process is collage, treated as a laboratory of form and composition — a point of departure for further painterly solutions.

Tania Kandracienka’s work stands out for its honesty, consistency, and deep authenticity. Her paintings are neither mere exercises of craft nor decorative facades, but spaces of genuine experience. Their power arises from the tension between technical mastery and emotional weight, between the personal and the universal language of form and color. In a world where authenticity so often fades, Kandracienka’s art restores meaning to what is fragile, delicate, and true. In the silence it leaves behind, doors open to our own inner world.