Adriana Swiersczcek was born in the Polish People’s Republic (now Poland) in 1973, studying at the European Academy of Art, Warsaw and completing her BA and MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her first solo exhibition in London was held at the Century Gallery in 2005; she has subsequently taught at Putney School of Art and Design and has exhibited her work with Ben Uri Gallery (among other venues), which now holds one of her drawings in its permanent collection.
Artist Adriana Swiersczcek was born in the Polish People’s Republic (now Poland) in 1973, studying at the European Academy of Art, Warsaw. After Poland became a member of the European Union in 2004, she moved to the UK to further her art education, completing her BA and MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.
She has subsequently exhibited in London, Warsaw and California. Her first solo exhibition in London was held at the Century Gallery in 2005, followed by Arts Unwrapped at ACAVA studios in 2008. The previous year she contributed the drawing Abduction of Europa (2006, Ben Uri Collection) to the exhibition Bomberg's Relevance held at Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art. Curated by Sarah Lightman, the show celebrated Bomberg’s legacy, inviting contemporary artists to respond to a work by Bomberg in the museum's permanent collection. Gloria Tessler wrote in the AJR Information that ‘Abduction of Europa is based on [Bomberg’s] Racehorses, a skeletal work of geometric precision, and fleshes out the gridwork into a surreal study of water, mythic creature and swimmer’ (Tessler 2007, p. 8). Swiersczcek commented that the common thread in her work is ‘to focus on structure using an invisible grid of measurements, and finding the architecture of objects in space’ (Ben Uri Collection). Swierszczek’s drawing came almost entirely from her imagination with the exception of the figure of the bull, observed from a Paul Manship sculpture of the same title. She built her closely observed pictorial planes by employing subtle shades of grey, presenting her figures with sharp, ‘chiseled’ outlines but leaving the light and shadows unresolved. Appropriating the Greek myth of Europa’s abduction, she altered the narrative to suggest Europa’s escape, also invoking a comment on the contemporaneous political situation in Europe.
Swiersczcek's drawing has also featured in Ben Uri’s No Set Rules (2015) and Art Out of the Bloodlands: A Century of Polish Artists in Britain (2017), as well as in the PSAD Summer Show, Putney School of Art and Design, London (2019). Living and working in London, she currently teaches Life Drawing at Putney School of Art and Design. In the UK public domain, her work is represented in the Ben Uri Collection.
Adriana Swierszczek in the Ben Uri collection
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Adriana Swierszczek]
Publications related to [Adriana Swierszczek] in the Ben Uri Library