Hesi Glowacki

Hesi Glowacki

Follow me

Degree: MA Painting
University: Royal College of Art
Graduation Year: 2023

New Blood Art Commentary

Hesi Glowacki, a Polish painter based in London, skillfully blends reality with fantasy to explore emotional and spiritual themes. After earning a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in 2020, Glowacki completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023. His work is influenced by personal experiences, religion, popular culture, and fashion, focusing on memory and otherness. Glowacki's art questions the role of ritual in modern life and the transformative nature of objects.

By juxtaposing primitive and contemporary elements, Glowacki's creations lie at the intersection of fine art and artefact. His art balances realistic and dreamlike, figurative and abstract elements, visualising memory and otherness while aiming for transformation and rebirth. Ritual and ceremony reframe the body as a site of power and beauty through alteration and decoration.

Glowacki's use of materials transforms narration into spiritual abstraction, metaphorically referencing alchemical transformation to symbolize self-transformation and identity formation. His installations, featuring artificial flowers and writing, enrich reflections on transmutation, concealment, and celebration, inviting viewers into a complex interplay of reality and fantasy. Glowacki's achievements include the Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship from the Chelsea Arts Club Trust in 2023 and the Phoebe Llewellyn Smith Award in 2019.

Artist Statement

My work pivots around memory, trauma, personal histories, and the effect on the body. I am often inspired by the stories that I have heard, personal experience, fashion photography from the '90, literature and magic realism. I paint an imaginary world that doesn't exist and also documenting a world I place myself in. Realistic and dreamlike, both figurative and abstract, an experiment in visualising and giving form to memory, trauma, and otherness, full of potential for transfiguration, resurrection, and rebirth. Drawing from the concept of ritual and ceremony and the notion of renewal and transformation, I want to alter the idea of the body as a victim of trauma and frame it instead as a site of power and beauty, primarily through body alteration, clothing, and decoration. I am interested in the performative quality of materials and how, once used, transform narration and acquire new meanings, rising almost to the status of spiritual abstraction. Through experimentation with materials, I refer to the alchemical transformation of base metal into gold and metaphorically manifest the internal process whose real goal is self-transformation. Change and renewal have an ambiguous and survival purpose, which helps with identity formation, world-making and recreation. The elements of installation, artificial flowers, objects, and writing play a role in the enriching reflection on transmutation, concealment and disclosure, memorial, and celebration.

Competitions, Prizes & Awards

(2019) Phoebe Llewellyn Smith Award Winner

(2017) Royal Female School of Art (RFSA) Award

(2023) Chelsea Arts Club Trust / Zsuzsi Roboz Scholarship