80x60, acrylic on canvas, 2020
Graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Faculty of Graphic Arts and Faculty of Textile and Fashion. In 2011, she received a doctorate in fine arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Faculty of Media Art and Stage Design. She is a publicist, photographer, theater set designer and illustrator. In 2014 she received the bronze medal "Meritorious to Culture Gloria Artis".
Joanna Hrk is interested in and actively pursues many aspects of art, choosing the medium and using technique to best, most fully explore the terrain of the field of art she is currently passionate about and absorbed by. When painting, she focuses on her interpretation of reality; her paintings are categorized as part of the magic realism trend, showing the seemingly ordinary world, which, however, deviates from normality due to the unusual, non-existent, assemblage of people, animals and places. This style, which draws inspiration from metaphysical painting, can be regarded as a specific form of surrealism. Despite all the fabulousness of the representations, the paintings are concrete reactions to everyday life, which provokes artistic notes in the form of grappling with canvas and paint pigments, consistently seeking the fairest application of colors according to the memory of emotions accompanying the stories he tells.
Since 2002, she has been fulfilling her childhood dream and illustrating children's stories, poetry for adults and other book publications, and has more than 350 illustrations for more than 80 books.
Theater has turned out to be a great passion. As a stage designer, she has more than 40 productions in puppet and drama theaters in Poland, including both stage buildings, puppet designs, masks and costumes. Joanna Hrk is an exceptional specialist - one of the few in Poland - a theoretician and practitioner with many years of experience dealing with the subject of artistic puppetry and theatrical puppetry. The other artistic subject that fascinates her madly is the vast subject of theatrical and artistic masks.
Since 2019, she has been working on a project related to the art mask, which is formally a three-dimensional art object, a kind of sculpture or perhaps an art installation, referring by association to the form of a ritual or theatrical mask, but serving the same function as a painting or sculpture. Her artistic masks have been presented at individual exhibitions in galleries in Bialystok, Gdansk, BWA in Zamosc and at the 2nd International Review of Contemporary Art 2020 in Ostroda. In 2022, at the invitation of the Polish Institute in New Delhi, an exhibition of artistic masks was presented at the Faculty of Slavonic Studies of the University of New Delhi in India and the Polish Embassy in New Delhi.
The artist has presented her work at more than 40 solo exhibitions and 70 group exhibitions in Poland. Participant of many international plein-airs, including plein-airs of illustrators. Member of the Association of Polish Artists of the Warsaw District. She is a quiet seeker of her own creative path, not a revolutionary. Colorist. By birth a resident of Łódź, in soul a nomad.
In 2018 she moved to the Mazovian countryside and heads the "Painted Mill" Association for Creative Development.
