Ewa Malijewska is a painter and a graphic artist. She was born in Gdańsk, educated in The Hague and lives in Rotterdam now. Her poignant kindness and arresting calmness mesmerise others from the very first encounter. Another successful exhibition of her linocuts in the Hague Barthkapel makes one think about the context of her art and its original form.
Exceptional education, highly-placed parents and respectable home – per definition – gave her everything that her peers, brought up in the dull and emaciated reality of People’s Poland, could only dream of. With her talent she could have easily made a successful career in the country but at the beginning of her adulthood she decided to move to the Netherlands, which she always associated with art. When she wasn’t accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk she understood that she wanted to go to the country of tulips. With 10 guldens in her pocket, she roamed the streets of Amsterdam, looking for adventures. She stayed with strangers and she visited museums with fake documents. This was one of the best times in my life. – She remembers the beginning of her emigration with a typical after-thought. Today she openly admits that Holland gave her education and freedom she could have never found in Poland.
Art was present in her life since early days. When she was a child she painted to run away from reality to the world of dreams and fantasies – the world she liked to be in. She was tired with the conventional. She liked to wander and move around. She often changed schools and addresses. She suffered with the thought of a cushy job from nine to five. The decision to become a painter was a natural choice for her. She graduated from the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Arts) in The Hague, always considered a very prestigious university. Currently she exhibits, paints and delves into the world of black-and-white linocuts with reverence. Meditation over the development of her artistic ego has taken her works outside galleries. Non-applied arts became applied and figures from her linocuts have found their way to colourful T-shirts that the Dutch bohemia wears today. Asked about her greatest artistic success she unexpectedly says: I never aim for success. I don’t have such ambitions. I create mainly for myself and this makes my art have value for others. Who is Ewa Malijewska? An agnostic in love with the Christ figure? An author looking for her identity in the poetic act of creation? Or maybe a fair-haired femme fatale with a coquettish smile? A little bit of everything! First of all she is the heroine of her own works, an alienated character, suspended somewhere in the universe, entangled in her loneliness, passing of time and the absurd of being. Art is always a self-portrait because you can never run away from yourself…
