About

Alicja Suska is a Polish visual artist working in large-scale, hand-built abstract paintings - constructed from numerous individually painted X shapes that create a geometric pattern raised into relief with structural paste.

Alicja grew up in Poland, and Polish heritage is where she takes inspiration from for her art. The X shape at the centre of her work comes directly from the technique she learned from her grandmother Urszula during summers they spent by the sea.

Cross-stitch and embroidery are folk arts, historically work performed by women across Poland and the rest of Slavic Europe - more often filed under craft or domestic tradition than taken seriously as art.

Alicja pulls that technique out of the embroidery hoop and onto canvas, at a scale and in a context where it has to be reckoned with as painting: a folk tradition made mostly by women, mostly at home, treated with the same weight as any other language of contemporary abstraction.

She went on to study art formally, earning a bachelor's degree in interior design and a master's in graphics, before spending ten years working as a UX designer in tech. Painting sat alongside that career quietly for years, until it became the focus it is today - after years spent designing digital products, Alicja found herself wanting to build something with her hands instead of a screen.

What started as an occasional practice grew into a defined technique, and eventually into collections she now builds one painting at a time.