Ron Mandos Young Blood Award 2024 to Katarzyna Baldyga
Katarzyna Baldyga is the winner of the Ron Mandos Young Blood Award 2024, the yearly award given to the best work from the Best of Graduates 2024 at Ron Mandos Gallery.
The Award was presented this afternoon by Suzanne Swarts, Director of Museum Voorlinden, during the festive opening party. The winning artwork, Untitled Painting, 2024, will be added to the permanent collection of Museum Voorlinden.
About the artist and the work, Suzanne Swarts said: ‘Seeing Katarzyna Baldyga’s work was love at first sight. It’s clear that she knows exactly what she’s doing. She has a unique ability to captivate the viewer, inviting them to join her in her experiment with painting, printing, and repainting.’
Katarzyna Baldyga is a Polish painter, graduated from DOGtime at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In her works she is using layered techniques to explore shifting shapes and ambiguity.
For Best of Graduates 2024, Katarzyna Baldyga (GRA 2024) presents a series of abstract paintings she poetically describes as transformations.
On the website of Ron Mandos her work is characterized as a dynamic process that involves painting, printing, and repainting, often flipping the canvas between upright and upside down. Baldyga’s approach is rooted in spontaneity, where each mark leads to a reaction, creating moments of revelation. This method embraces the fluidity and unpredictability of paint, allowing the medium to dictate the outcome. Her large-format canvases enable her to explore relationships between parts and wholes, resulting in works that straddle reality and illusion, simplicity and complexity.
