Julia Curyło was born in Warsaw. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there, graduating in 2009 with a degree under two respected professors—Leon Tarasewicz in painting and Mirosław Duchowski in art for public space. That dual focus—studio and street—has stuck with her. By 2010, her work Lambs of God, a bold mural, was displayed in a Warsaw subway station. It mixed religion, pop surrealism, and social commentary in a way that felt both irreverent and sincere. That same year, she won top prizes from the Minister of Culture and the BWA City Gallery. She’s since shown work in over 60 exhibitions across Poland and abroad. Her art is housed in national collections and private homes alike. In 2021, she published a book on her own cosmic visual language—and in 2025, her work Lost Dreams heads to the Manes Gallery in Prague.
Julia Curyło doesn’t paint to tell you what to think. She paints to ask what the world even is. Her work is full of visual paradoxes—holy lambs wearing blindfolds, astronauts in absurd poses, cartoon elements placed in cosmic landscapes. If you think that sounds like a joke, it is—but it’s also dead serious. She describes her paintings as part of a dialogue between significance and triviality. They don’t settle for one or the other.
What drives her is the tension between opposites. Piety and perversion. Childhood and adulthood. Science and faith. Beauty and tackiness. These aren’t oppositions she tries to resolve. Instead, she stages them together, side by side, until something new emerges—often surreal, sometimes grotesque, sometimes oddly sweet.
At the center of it all is a kind of visual empathy. No matter how strange or theatrical the image, there’s usually a softness to it. Even the absurd feels lovingly rendered. She doesn’t mock. She presents. And that’s part of what gives her paintings their bite—they don’t moralize, but they don’t shy away either.
Her subject matter is wide-ranging. Space travel, saints, baby toys, scientific illustrations, baroque painting, modern culture. She samples freely, like a DJ with a sharp ear for strange harmonies. Art history shows up, but so does kitsch. She pulls from religious symbolism, scientific diagrams, and internet culture, then mixes it all together with a good dose of irony.
The humor in her work matters. It’s not just decoration—it’s a way to disarm, to sidestep easy judgment. The jokes in her paintings make space for more serious thought. A flying saucer might float beside a sacred figure. A childlike form might be surrounded by animals with knowing eyes. These combinations don’t tell you what’s right or wrong. They just hold up a mirror to how strange, inconsistent, and layered human experience really is.
But if irony runs through the work, so does care. Her technique is deliberate, often lush, sometimes almost ornamental. These aren’t casual paintings—they’re built. The color is rich. The detail is exact. The composition is theatrical, often symmetrical, like old altarpieces or Eastern European folk art. That structure lets the weirdness land. Without it, the painting might float away. With it, you’re drawn in—held still long enough to feel the tension.
Underlying many of her pieces is a quiet ecological unease. Civilization eats up the world, and she knows it. Nature shows up in her paintings, but it’s often overwhelmed by technology, myth, or man-made chaos. Still, she doesn’t sound the alarm. She just points, gently but firmly.
There’s a warmth to her absurdity. Her work doesn’t come from a cold, academic place. It comes from being alive in a world where everything collides—tradition and novelty, ritual and randomness, reality and dream. Her paintings carry the burden of knowing too much, but they also know how to laugh.
Julia Curyło isn’t painting answers. She’s painting the questions we carry around every day but rarely say out loud. That’s what makes her work so easy to connect with. And so hard to forget.
