Iwona Sztuka

About Iwona

Iwona was born in Poland (1977), is a lawyer by education, and has been running her own businesses for years in difficult industries, such as real estate, banking, heavy transport and enterprise management. These are big challenges, but the real passion that makes her happy and takes her to another dimension is painting.

She has been painting for a short time, since 2019. But when she was born, she received a wonderful gift from her parents: the surname Sztuka, which literally means Art. At the age of 4, she inherited a wooden box filled with oil paints from her father, an amateur painter. Unscrewing the tubes and sniffing the paints was a magical ritual for the little girl. She carefully practices this ritual to this day.

She is a lover of Italy and everything Italian, especially Italian Renaissance painting. She is in love with the work of Michelangelo and Caravaggio, but her greatest inspirations are strong women from the world of art, artists such as Frida Kahlo, Tamara Lempicka, Georgia O'Keeffe or art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Her painting, mainly as a hobby, mostly oil and large-format, is dominated by femininity, purity of colors, simplicity of form and message. She creates in her over a hundred-year-old studio, treating the entire process as a form of meditation. In 2023, she completed postgraduate studies in the History of Art and Painting in Warsaw. Is she an artist? She doesn't know, although she likes to think of herself that way, especially when she creates... when 'torment and ecstasy' take the body away from the real world for a few hours. Was it she who discovered her passion for painting, or was it the artist's soul and the genes of her ancestors who claimed their rightful place in her life? The story seems to be encoded in her surname.