ARTIST STATEMENT

As a performance painter, I examine the interplay between sound and painting, exploring the aesthetics of improvisation and composition in my work. This exploration is both an immediate, physical experience and a reflective, conceptual journey. My practice incorporates acting and dance techniques such as Meisner and Contact Improvisation to explore the qualities of mark-making through gestural, automatic, accidental and incidental marking interspersed with contemplative periods of judgement, editing and contextualisation.

I’m interested in the vibrancy, vitality and history of places, bodies and objects and the significance of human creativity in the post-human age. My work is an exercise in listening and looking more deeply with the whole body and a meditation on solitude and connection. I am interested in how the digital turn has impacted how we see and how we paint. I explore what it is to draw from memory, the imagination, concepts, prescribed patterns and intuitive processes. My own experience in the work is often transformative by allowing me to explore cognitive processes that underlie our emotional and conceptual relationship with the arts.

Abstract and figurative painting is the central context within which I explore these questions. I also produce videos, projections, installations, photographic works and performances that examine the complexities of exchange and attunement. My exhibitions often include live painting installations, live dance and music performances as well as print editions, paintings of all sizes and video projections.

BIOGRAPHY

Claire Zakiewicz is an artist currently working in London. Named in the New York's top ten artists list for Art511 magazine, 2018, her practice examines the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and painting. She explores how this research can be applied within the context of performance, drawing, music, photography, installation and video works.

Born in London, UK, Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art and Anglia Ruskin University and received an MA from Sir John Cass School of Art while exhibiting and performing widely in London and Bergen throughout the 2000s. Between 2009 and 2012 Zakiewicz was a member of the ensemble Fig. with composer Alwynne Pritchard and sound artist Thorolf Thuestad, who performed together in London, Bergen and New York. Her works were presented at Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, in the exhibitions Tweet Me Up, 2011 and Label, 2012 curated by Tracey Moberly.

Between 2013 and 2020, Zakiewicz was based in New York. She undertook numerous art residencies, including Mothership NYC, PointB Worklodge and Bill Young's Dance Studio, Soho. During her time in the USA Zakiewicz exhibited and performed at venues including The Elizabeth Foundation, NOoSPHERE Arts, Last Frontier NYC, Mothership NYC, Plaxall Gallery, Itinerant Performing Arts Festival and Satellite Art Show (Miami). Zakiewicz co-founded Creatrix Magazine with Jana Astanov in 2019, which she writes for regularly and is currently producing Creatrix Pod, a weekly podcast of interviews with female artists, writers and critics.

Since 2020 Zakiewicz has reoriented back to the art scene in Europe and has had residencies at Cill Rialaig in Ireland and The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout in Suffolk, England. Now living and working in London, Zakiewicz has recently exhibited with artist/poet Sophie Seita in the duo show 'There's no way I can know it, the object or the body' at Hoxton 253 Arts Project Space. She has been collaborating with many London-based artists and performers including co-authors of the publication Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall, Simon Tyszko of Resonance FM, improvisational musicians Peter Nagle and Emily Suzanne Shapiro of 'Mellifera' Arts Platform and actor/writer Dannie-Lu Car. She performed and exhibited as part of the performance drawing event and exhibition curated by Ram Samocha 'Field of Action' in 2022. At the end of 2022 Claire staged a solo immersive performance painting during the closing month of the Venice Biennale 2022 titled Tintoretto's Daughter, a collaboration with the Venice-based photographer Mark Edward Smith on a project exploring the possibilities of performance painting documentation, which was reviewed by William Kherbek for SPAM zine.

Her essay 'The Aesthetics of Failure' was published by Bloomsbury in 'The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts; Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished', 2020.

CV Highlights

1997 - 2010
BTec Foundation (Art & Design), Chelsea College of Art, London (1997)
BA in Fine Art (Printmaking) from ARU Cambridge (2020)
MA by Project (Fine Art) from London Metropolitan University (2010)

2011
Video works presented at Tate Tanks, for the exhibition Tweet me up and projections screened at Tate Britain, in the exhibition Label curated by Tracey Moberly

2013 - 2020
Lived and worked in New York on an O1 Visa; was named in the New York's top 10 artists list in Art511 magazine, 2018

2020
Published essay "The Aesthetics of Failure" in "The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished" (Bloomsbury)

2021
Group show with Birgitta Hosea & Carali McCall (co-authors of Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945) for Some Loose Assemblies, 100 Years Gallery, London

Duo project with Gerald Curtis for Writing the Future, Watermans Art Centre London, ACE funded

Duo exhibition with Sophie Seita "There's no way I can know it, the object or the body", HOXTON 253 Art Project Space, London, funded by Hackney Council

2022
Sonic works brodcast on Isotopica for Resonance FM

Staged solo immersive performance painting at Venice Biennale, "Tintoretto's Daughter"; reviewed by SPAM zine in Kherbek's essay 'Posthuman, all too human'.

2023
Solo Show Boudicca's Daughters at Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, UK

2024
Launched Creatrix Pod

Full downloadable CV