Wojciech Wos depicts intimate scenes from his bedroom in watery blue hues

“Imagine a Polish queer artist and his nude self-portraits being exhibited on the wall of a bank in very conservative Northern Ireland. I am sure all the conservatives were delighted to see all those pieces on the daily.” Wojciech Wos paints a humorous image as he tells It’s Nice That about exhibiting in his first ever group show. His paintings are contemplative, often soaked in melancholic hues of blue and suffused with a sense of nostalgia. Treating his art as a kind of “diary”, Wojciech uses it as a way of recording his most intimate experiences, “as I don’t know how to talk about stuff I go through sometimes.”

Talking of the colour blue, the artist says: “It’s a very emotional colour. Pretty sad.” But he also connects it with the volatile surface of water, which he loved painting during his uni days. Apart from blue there are a few other elements that have come to characterise Wojciech’s style. The little black bird which often appears reminds Wojciech of home. “Birds are very important to me,” he says. “Even though I moved quite a lot in the past, birds weirdly always follow me.” So in his intimate bedroom scenes, we often see Wojciech attended by one of these “little companions”. The presence of white socks is another recurring feature – “such an everyday item but still very sexual, so I like playing with the symbolism.”

Although he’s now based in Berlin, Wojciech grew up in a small town in Poland called Słubice. Wojciech recalls how he would ask his father to draw pictures of characters from his favourite illustration books: “He got fed up eventually so I tried it myself and I kept getting better over time.” One of Wojciech’s favourite paintings refers back to the town of his childhood. When he was visiting his parents in 2021, he went for a bicycle ride, the first time he’d ridden since he’d had an accident as a child. “I cycled in the countryside for hours and I felt very connected to nature. I felt very peaceful and it was something I really needed at that time.” His painting, Surrounded by Clouds, is a self portrait. He has his back turned to us with a little bird companion perched atop his head. The white fluffy clouds that surround his head summon up that ineffable sense of calm that the artist felt on this adventure into the countryside.

Cosy room is another nostalgic painting for Wojciech. The composition is filled with the early morning light that falls in such a way as to perfectly emphasise the curved back and perky behind of a languid figure. This arrangement references the last photograph Wojciech took of himself before leaving Ireland after living there for seven years. “As you know, Ireland wouldn’t be considered the most sunny place in the world so it’s pretty rare to have a full-on blast of sun. This was one of those sunny days. It’s like the green land wanted to say goodbye to me with a kiss of the sun.”