Zuza Golińska

Zuza Golińska works primarily with sculpture and installation to create robust, spatial interventions that investigate the relationship between humans, public space, and architecture.

Golińska’s practice is rooted in a variety of visual references from a kind of raw, brutalist post-industrial materiality to dystopian science fiction and pre-modernism. Inspired by the radical Arte Povera movement of the 1970s, her materials are often chosen as symbolic elements of gendered socio-political narrative around labour and industry, such as recycled steel from a shipyard in her hometown of Gdańsk. Inherently participatory in their nature, her work frequently disrupts the clear-cut division between the functional and the aesthetic as she examines the influence of spatial forms on emotions and decisions of users. Using different means, Golińska builds new models of shared spaces that redirects the spatial orientation outside the solid, by drawing the user’s attention to their surroundings, and the experience of participation.

Zuza Golińska lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. She is a MA graduate of the Mirosław Bałka Studio of Spatial Activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 2018, she won the ArtePrize awarded by the ArteVue and Delfina Foundation in London. In 2022, she became one of the three winners of Dorothea von Stetten Art Award organised by Kunstmuseum Bonn in Germany. She has held solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Poland; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland; among others. Her works can be found in numerous private and institutional collections, including the ING Polish Art Foundation, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Servais Family Collection, and European Investment Bank (EIB).