Weronika Anna Rosa
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, directing her curiosity and 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. She is passionate about colour and uses bold, yet harmonious combinations of pigments.
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-meanings.
Rosa strongly appreciate the artistic heritage of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, especially the French Nabis, Arts&Crafts movement, Art Nouveau and Art Déco, as well as the Japanese savoir-faire and it’s aesthetic sensibility.
Jadwiga, the artist’s grandma in the biochemistry laboratory, around 1955
In 2020 Rosa was selected as one of the very few artists of the Matter of the Master - New Vision of Tradition programme, by representing the matter of Textile. In 2023, her botanical illustrations were selected for the annual exhibition of the Society of Botanical Artists, in London. The same year, she had her solo show at the Przeswit Gallery, in Warsaw. Currently, she is working on her project “Traces of Memories”, creating an intersection between creativity and conservation of nature, which will be featured at the National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon, in 2025.
The artist is constantly curious about experimenting with various artistic techniques and media to obtain diverse textures, scales, effects and volumes. 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 artworks are in private collections in Poland, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, England, Switzerland, and United States.
fot. João Lima, “Activa”