NADIA LESNIAREK

Nadia Lesniarek is a London-based painter whose work is shaped by the experience of drawing with diplopia (double vision), using painting as a meditation on unstable spatial perception. 

 

Driven by an architectural and musical logic, her practice explores disorientation in visual and haptic space. Working across drawing and collage with oil, acrylic, and ink, she approaches painting as a rhythmic and meditative process in which intention is continually disrupted by material improvisation and chance. Her paintings oscillate between density and translucency, using repetition, distortion, and tactile mark-making to construct and dissolve dreamlike bodies, interiors, and shifting environments.

 

Trained in architecture at the University of Cambridge and the Royal College of Art, Lesniarek draws on architectural systems of ordering space while simultaneously unsettling them. Grids, mirrored symmetries, and perspectival structures are repeatedly built up and undone, producing impossible spatial conditions that hover between coherence and collapse.

 

Pattern and repetition function both formally and psychologically, generating rhythm, instability, and muscular fatigue, echoing the experience of diplopia, while allowing images to emerge through the process of painting itself. The work inhabits a space between control and uncertainty, where perception becomes fluid and the act of looking is continually renegotiated.

 

Recent exhibitions include In the Stillness of a Word at House 54, Camberwell Green (2026), Maintenance Tools of Body and City (solo, 2024), The 54 Art Show (2024), and The Home (2025). Her work is held in the permanent collection of Jesus College, Cambridge, and she is a recipient of the Tony Snowdon Award.

 

Lesniarek is a founding member of Threadbare, a curatorial collective recently in residence at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2025), and currently co-hosts a seminar series with the Feminist Library in London.