About

My practice is based on an ongoing research into urban living and architecture. I am interested in how the public intersects with the urban landscape. Born in Poland and now living in London, I’ve adopted the position of an outsider or stranger to respond to a sense of displacement increasingly common to inhabitants of contemporary metropolises. My drawings and sculpted ‘anti-structures’ drawn from documentary research of London and Warsaw explore the changing facade of the city. I combine my disjointed recollections with the present reality to examine the disparity between individual identity and collective memory.

“Anka Dabrowska’s drawings explore the territories both real and imagined. Using a complex interplay of aesthetic and thematic contradictions, she creates drawings and sculptures, that are at once delicate and personal yet detached, fragmented and uncanny. By mapping the city through intense research projects, Dabrowska collects the hidden traces of public and private histories through which we make the city our own. The drawings playfully reinterpret bleak urban and rural landscapes in the intricate style that she has become known for. Dabrowska’s drawings of the tenement blocks, shop fronts, and more recently flowers and insects, are set adrift against the disquieting blankness of an empty page. In some works she uses the irreverent pattern of street graffiti and that of the domestic interiors (wallpaper pattern) to contrast with the fragile precision of her drawn lines, suggesting fragmented stories from the city. Dabrowska’s sculptures mutate and transform in a colourful display of architectural alchemy. Built from the disregarded wreckage of everyday life, Dabrowska combines cardboard, wood, garish plastics and concrete alongside documentary snapshots and bright sprayed graffiti. No material is too base and ‘taste’ is cast aside as consumerism and punk aesthetics collide. Although her work is intensely private and semi-autobiographical, it moves beyond personal circumstances to address the common drift through our shared environment, tracing the possibilities for a poetic recuperation of our alienated urban spaces.“

- Rebecca Geldard, The Guardian.

Anka Dabrowska (b. 1979 Warsaw, Poland) graduated in 2003 from University of Northumbria in Newcastle where she attained her Masters in Fine Art with distinction. She lives and works in London and has exhibited widely nationally and internationally.