NADIA LESNIAREK

Nadia Lesniarek is an artist based in Peckham. Trained in architecture at the University of Cambridge and the Royal College of Art, her practice is driven by the question: what happens when systems of spatial order encounter the instability of bodies, materials and time? Shaped by her experience of diplopia (double vision), she uses painting as a site to test how structures fracture, overlap and transform, allowing distinctions between body, interior and landscape, surface and depth, to remain fluid rather than fixed.

 

Works begin as biro drawings composed of slightly displaced vertical lines describing bodies or interior spaces. Through mirroring, collage, repetition and patterning, these drawings accumulate into layered structures that move between architectural interiors, landscapes, relics and sculptural forms. When translated into painting, the lines lose their original precision as they thicken, fade and become translucent, generating shifting rhythms of form and perception.

 

Lesniarek paints onto textured canvas and dyed polyester taffeta, using surfaces that evoke skin, water, weathered plaster and urban fabric. As light shifts across these materials, folds, crinkles and exposed grounds interrupt painted structures, while layers accumulate through cycles of erasure, restoration and repair. Rather than preserving a singular image, the paintings function as palimpsests: traces of earlier states remain visible as forms dissolve, re-emerge and are continually reconfigured. Material, perception and time become active agents within the work, unsettling architectural systems of order from within.

 

Recent exhibitions include In the Stillness of a Word at House 54, Camberwell (2026), and The Home, The Outhouse at The Outhouse, Camberwell (2025). Upcoming projects include Unanchored City at Copeland Gallery, London (2026), and a residency culminating in a solo exhibition at the Špejchar Institute of Culture and Ecology, Czech Republic. Lesniarek is also a founding member of Threadbare, a curatorial collective exploring relationships between architecture and the body.