Madpolka is a Polish-born, London-based artist whose practice centres on drawing and painting as a way of examining the female presence in social and cultural space. Educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź (Poland) with Master Degree in Textile, she has lived and worked in London for over three decades, navigating the layered identities formed between origin and environment.
Her work focuses primarily on the female figure. Rather than presenting the body as an object of desire. Madpolka approaches the female silhouette as a site of memory, experience and cultural inheritance. Each figure becomes a visual construction shaped by personal history, ancestral traces and the subtle pressures of the societies in which women live.
Growing up in communist Poland formed an early awareness of social hierarchy and gender dynamics. These experiences continue to inform her exploration of power, visibility and recognition, including the persistent imbalance between women and men in areas such as labour, value and acknowledgement.
In Madpolka’s work, the body is not static but layered—carrying the marks of time, place and collective memory. Her drawings and paintings reflect the idea that identity is continuously shaped by surroundings, whether consciously accepted or unconsciously absorbed. The figures that emerge are therefore both individual and universal: silhouettes built from lived experience, cultural influence and inherited narratives.
Through this process, Madpolka reclaims the female form as a space of resilience, complexity and self-definition rather than objectification.