Justyna Kisielewicz: Art as Critique and Provocation

Polish-born and Miami-based artist Justyna Kisielewicz presents Living Space, her first solo exhibition at La Cometa. In this bold and colorful show, satire and symbolism converge to challenge the power structures and excesses of contemporary culture. The exhibition opens to the public on September 13.

Living Space

Curated by Verónica Pesantes Vallejo, Living Space constructs a vivid visual discourse on the legacy of colonialism, historical violence, and the ongoing search for freedom. Kisielewicz creates a lush, symbol-laden universe where the ornamental and the allegorical coexist to question the dominant narratives that have shaped global history. Her densely populated compositions weave tropical flora and fauna from Florida with masked figures adorned in luxury fashion brands, using humor and visual fables to critique patriarchal discourses and colonial frameworks that continue to define perceptions of the "other."

The exhibition recontextualizes the term Lebensraum—heavily loaded with references to Nazi expansionist ideology—to speak instead of memory, displacement, and reclamation. Rather than perpetuating a logic of conquest, Kisielewicz transforms art into an act of personal and collective empowerment, urging viewers to critically examine the historical structures that still shape our present.

Born in Warsaw in 1983, Justyna Kisielewicz is an artist who has crossed both physical and symbolic borders. Trained in painting and textile arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and in political science at the University of Warsaw, she left Poland in 2015 and relocated to the United States, where she now lives and works in Miami. Her move was more than a geographic shift—it became a metaphorical conquest: an artist from Eastern Europe seeking creative freedom in the visual epicenter of Western capitalism.

Coming from a country historically oppressed by colonial powers and neighboring empires such as Russia, Germany, and Austria, Kisielewicz has built a body of work that uses color and image as tools of resistance. Her vibrant palette stands in direct opposition to the austere pragmatism of the Soviet regime under which she was raised. Drawing on historical references, her work embraces the camp aesthetic—intentionally exaggerated and theatrical—to expose the constructed fictions of both past and present systems of domination and exclusion.

Using bold colors and ornamental detail, Kisielewicz works primarily in textiles, drawing, and painting. These media form the foundation for a visual universe of familiar references that, once filtered through her lens, become unexpected and provocative—works that resist easy categorization.

Kisielewicz approaches colonialism as a mutable and pervasive historical force—one that can adapt and reproduce itself across different contexts. She embraces appropriation as a fundamental strategy in her practice, using it to disrupt established norms and highlight the surface obsessions and indulgences of contemporary life.

Unafraid to confront complex or controversial themes—faith, sexual freedom, environmental collapse—Kisielewicz’s work challenges inherited taboos. Having grown up in a rigidly communist and Catholic context where desire was suppressed and power was rarely questioned, she now uses art as a tool for liberation. In her latest artist statement, she describes how color became her refuge from the brutalist grayness of her childhood, and how her work now seeks to create a "living space”—a space for dialogue across difference, where pain is not ranked and history is not romanticized.

Through technical mastery and sharp wit, Justyna Kisielewicz constructs a body of work that is at once a mirror and a critique of our times. Above all, her practice affirms the right to remember, to question, and to imagine alternative worlds.