NADIA LESNIAREK

Nadia Lesniarek is a London-based painter and curator whose work explores the tension between architectural structure and somatic improvisation. Trained in architecture at the University of Cambridge and the Royal College of Art, she creates layered compositions that move between figuration and abstraction, where bodily gesture meets spatial logic.

 

Before transitioning to painting full-time, Lesniarek worked at Herzog & de Meuron and Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A), contributing to major projects including the RCA Battersea campus and the redesign of the Eiffel Tower’s public realm. Her background in spatial design, drawing conventions, and phenomenology continues to inform her visual language, where formal structures like grids, mirrored symmetry, and perspectival depth are repeatedly built up and undone.

 

Working with oils, acrylics, inks, and watercolours, her paintings oscillate between density and translucency. She uses repetition, distortion, and tactile mark-making with threaded lines, smeared and inky gestures which dissolve to form dreamlike bodies and shifting environments. This materially responsive approach emerged alongside her MA research at the RCA (2019–2021), which focused on disability and sensory experience. 

 

Recent exhibitions include Maintenance Tools of Body and City (solo, 2024), The 54 Art Show (2024), The Home (2025), and workshop Designing Different at the Wellcome Collection (2020). Her work is held in the permanent collection of Jesus College, Cambridge, and she is a recipient of the Tony Snowdon Award.

 

She is a founding member of Threadbare, a curatorial collective in residence this year at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, currently preparing a major exhibition on the politics of interiors in London next year (2026). Her current painting practice investigates spatial and somatic embodiment. She  draws on theories of dancer Petra Kuppers and visual influences from Art Nouveau curvature and the theatricality of the Baroque to Egon Schiele’s wiry tension, and Francis Bacon’s fleshy collapse.