Weronika in the Botanical Garden in Warsaw, around 1995
Weronika Anna Rosa was born in Warsaw in 1990, a year after the Berlin wall fell. Searching for beauty in a grey reality has always been her natural instinct. She grew up in a family involved in arts and natural sciences. These two distant and, at the same time complementary worlds, constitute a strong pillar of her visual sensibility and directed her further artistic researches. In her family home, there were always cut flowers on the table and some pots with plants in every room. Rapidly, they become her favourite subject to paint, because they are full of life and small miracles.
She graduated from History of Art at University of Warsaw and Universidade de Lisboa, and gained botanical knowledge at Universidade Nova. She developed her artistic education, rich in experimenting with various techniques and visual forms, in France and Portugal (including ArCo and Belas Artes), where she currently lives.
Her artworks are strongly influenced by the naturalistic education she received from her grandparents, both researcher and biochemists. Each painting starts with a careful observation of the nature and is preceded by a series of botanical studies. In her latest projects, the artist focuses on relationships between plants and humans; current socio-cultural and environmental factors. Rosa does not depict plants with a realistic accuracy, but searches for their identity and anatomical algorithm, by analysing species stories, etymology, and by observing their nature. She sees them as a universal language with multitude of ways of interpretation, that everybody is allowed to read differently. The highly aestheticising visual layer of her paintings is a kind of puzzle - a veil hiding the multi-meaning narrative.
In 2023, Rosa's botanical illustrations were selected for the annual exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists, in London. The same year, she had her solo show “The Human Nature” at the Przeswit Gallery, in Warsaw.
Jadwiga, the artist’s grandma in the biochemistry laboratory, around 1955
“I wish to activate different senses in the audience. A sense of being intimately connected with the painting; an experience of beauty, melody of colours and harmony of shapes. The most satisfactory for me, is to hear that somebody has an emotional relation with my painting and experience it in a very personal way.”
The artist is interested in experimenting with various artistic techniques and media to obtain diverse textures, scales and volumes. She often reach for the Kraft paper, which name comes from the Swedish word "kraft" meaning "strength”. It unfolds from a roll like a fabric, it can be cut into meters with no length limits, emphasising the organic, growing movement. Multi-layered, highly pigmented and dense paint turns Kraft into a material resembling precious silk with a velvety texture.
Rosa strongly appreciate the artistic heritage of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the French Nabis, Arts&Crafts movement and Art Nouveau, as well as the art of the Far East. In 2019, Weronika received a private mécénat to develop a collection of artistic fabrics and silk scarves. After being presented at the prestigious fashion salon in Paris, a part of her collection has been purchased by the Victoria&Albert Museum in London.
Her botanical artworks are in private collections in Poland, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, England, Switzerland, and United States.
fot. João Lima, “Activa”