Weronika Hempel — On Stillness, Transformation, and the In-Between

Kim Köster — Landscape, Light, and Fragmented Narratives Reading Weronika Hempel — On Stillness, Transformation, and the In-Between 6 minutes Next Christian Hellmich – on Painting, Gaze, and Time

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Interview

Weronika Hempel divides her time between Warsaw and Zamość, with the stillness of the small town shaping her practice through heightened attention to subtle change, memory, and transformation. Her Gardens series translates organic forms into abstraction, exploring the fragile in-between moments where blooming and fading, presence and disappearance coexist, rooted in personal and familial memory. Balancing control and intuition, her work creates intimate yet open spaces that invite viewers to pause and project their own experiences of transition.

You live and work in Warsaw. In what ways does the city – with its atmospheres, ruptures, and everyday scenes – inscribe itself into your artistic practice? Are there specific moments or images of Warsaw that keep returning to you while you work in the studio?

I divide my life between Warsaw and Zamość, but it’s Zamość that shapes my artistic practice the most. Warsaw is where I live, with all its intensity and constant motion, but Zamość is where time almost stops... There, in the slow rhythm of a small town, where faces repeat more often, life feels a little softer. I walk barefoot on the grass, I drink my coffee from an old grandma's teacup, accompanied by birds and morning fresh air, and all my senses open - I can exhale... and see.

This stillness is not passive; it transforms me. It teaches me to notice the smallest shifts... the way a flower lifts its head after rain, how light curls around a window, how silence can hold entire stories. My Gardens series was born from this atmosphere of gentle metamorphosis. It carries the cycles of blooming and withering, of returning home, of being held by memory and letting memory go.

The garden there was once my mother’s dream, a place she imagined for herself and for us. Now it has become one of my most intimate sources of inspiration, a living reminder of her tenderness and strength.

Regarding the works in our current group exhibition: Could you tell us more about the pieces currently on view here – which thematic questions and formal decisions were particularly important to you in developing them?

The works in this exhibition come from my Gardens series, where I explore my fascination with transformation. Each piece represents that delicate moment when a flower is both blooming and fading, reminding that beauty and fragility coexist in the same time. This tension is the emotional core of the paintings.

Formally, I focused on creating a sense of movement within abstraction. I wanted the palette to feel almost bodily, as if the colors were pushing against one another, generating their own pulse and energy. The contrasts between light and shadow, softness and sharp contours, reflects the dualities I carry into the work: strength and delicacy, calm and disruption, presence and disappearance.

What mattered to me most to me was building a space that feels intriguing, intimate but open, something that invites the viewer to pause. The intense tones pull you in before you even realize what forms you’re looking at. These works come from very personal reflections on home, memory, and the fleeting nature of things, but I hope they also leave room for others to find their own experiences and interpretation within them.

Recurring motifs: Which themes, images, or forms tend to resurface in your work, perhaps even when you are not consciously looking for them?

I often return to organic forms like petals, folds, silhouettes of plants, but filtered through abstraction, as if they’ve been remembered rather than observed. It’s rarely about a single image- it’s more about a feeling, a kind of emotional echo, that lead me back to what keeps shaping my work between presence and disappearance.

Chance and control: How do you navigate between planning and openness in your process – when do you allow chance to take over, and at which moments do you intervene with a clear sense of control?

For me, it's an everyday negotiation. Asking myself the same questions: What should stay? What needs to be erased? When is the moment to step back so the work doesn’t become "overspoken"? I can easily lose myself in the moment, so I often have to hold back - especially in this series, where I’m reaching for a very precise effect.

But there is another side to my practice, where I set all boundaries aside. For the balance, in different abstract works, I let myself surrender completely feeling like a master of chaos. I love when unspoken parts of me take over the canvas. It’s like allowing the heart to move before the mind tries to shape anything.

Both approaches feel necessary: one teaches me clarity and discipline, the other teaches me freedom.

Looking ahead: What are you currently working on – or what is already beginning to take shape in your mind – that we can look forward to discovering in the near future?

I’m continuing the Gardens series, but it’s slowly shifting toward a deeper exploration of cycles and focusing more on what's in between those two stages. The moment where change is already happening but still invisible. That “in-between” has become a true heart of a change and it has become central to my thinking.

At the same time, I’m searching for new techniques and new ways of expressing what I feel. I already started a new cycle: more representative, yet still led by intuition. These works reach into darker shades of feminine energy and reflect my thoughts on relationships - their shadows, the emotional truths and imbalances we often carry quietly.

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