Magda Kirk

Magda Kirk, born Magdalena Kirklewska in 1990 in Poland, lives and works in Gdańsk. She graduated cum laude from the Painting Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 2015, then stopped painting altogether, working in other fields and travelling, and returned to it full time in 2019. She paints bodies without heads or identifying features, anonymous and incomplete, held in a hazy light, drawing on models, bodybuilders and superheroes to work on how cultural images of the body settle into ordinary people's sense of themselves. Motifs from tattoo culture, trash graffiti and cartoons run across the flesh and sometimes become it. The paintings are built in layers of colour and airbrushed doodles, and they hold humour next to horror, cuteness next to aggression, in a luminous and unreal kind of realism.

Solo exhibitions include Closer at GR Gallery, New York (2023) and Venus and Adonis at Everyday Gallery, Antwerp. Her work has been shown at Yusto/Giner in Marbella and Madrid, at Galería Fran Reus in Palma, at Tuesday to Friday in Valencia, at Dopeness Art Lab in Taipei, in Manscaping at The Hole and Superzoom in Paris, and in To Bodily Go… curated by Saša Bogojev in Miami. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Eibisch Prize.

Kirk has worked with Plan X since 2022, with the exhibition Without Warning in Milan, followed by Superself, her first solo exhibition in Italy, in 2023, and presentations at Untitled Art Miami Beach and Contemporary Art Now Ibiza.