Paulina Semkowicz
born in 1980 in Krakow, lives in Vienna, Austria and Krakau, Poland
Untitled (Tropez), 2024
wallpaper, recurring pattern, digitally edited from two watercolors as source
Commission evn collection 2025
First shown at Wallpaper #7, 2024 in Maria Enzersdorf, Austria
Inv. No. WP_33
The EVN headquarters in Maria Enzersdorf is a building from the early 1960s and one of the few office buildings in Austria to have retained the original language of post-war modernist architecture. The grid structure of the windows and the regular facade structure are clearly visible from the outside. Inside the building, the design language is also reduced and functional, albeit implemented with simple elegance. The wallpaper that Paulina Semkowicz (born 1980 in Krakow, lives in Vienna) created for the evn sammlung 2024 also uses a grid-like structure as its basic motif. The grid extends across all seven floors of the stairwell. Unlike the grid resulting from the function of the building’s curtain wall glass facade, Paulina Semkowicz’s grid is a distorted image of a regular structure. She distorts and twists the grid, which is regular in itself, and thus brings movement and liveliness to this form of order. It is a very playful approach to form and material, almost a caricature of the existing logical structure. The motif was created very classically with ink and color pigments on cardboard, photographed and digitally implemented as wallpaper. Despite this technical necessity, the highly painterly effect can be seen, as the grid is underlaid with an incredible variation of color tones. Each floor has its own world of color and dynamics. It is obvious that the artist studied stage painting and is therefore particularly good at dealing with dimensions and spatial effects. Paulina Semkowicz manages to create transparency, light and depth through her painting. And thus also provides the perfect stage for illusion and imagination.continue reading
Text: Heike Maier-Rieper, 2024
Translation: Michael Strand