Zuzanna Bartoszek
36 Pokoi
Forthcoming: December 2025 (Polish Edition), May 2026 (English Edition)
36 Rooms exists between the traditions of short story and prose poetry, establishing an entirely singular atmosphere. Zuzanna Bartoszek’s work arises from personal experiences, but encodes its meanings through metaphor, venturing into dreamlike landscapes, synesthetically bound together by "something of a brick-red colour". Bartoszek abandons a linear plot, choosing an open and fragmentary form based on a series of associations and recurring motifs. Each reading reveals new connections between scattered clues. Drawing on the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, the author moves freely between literature and painting—her own and that of artists from her circle—fusing distinct arts into a sensory system.
Zuzanna Bartoszek (b. 1993, Poznań) is an artist and writer whose practice includes painting, drawing, poetry, and prose. Her poetry collection, Klucz wisi na Słońcu (The Key Hangs on the Sun), was nominated for the Wisława Szymborska Award in 2022.
She is a recipient of the ING Polish Art Foundation Prize (2021) and has presented her works in numerous galleries and institutions, including Gaylord Apartments (Los Angeles, 2023), Kunsthalle Zurich (2018), Cell Project Space (London, 2017) and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2017). In 2026 Bartoszek is joining the Rijksakademie residency programme in Amsterdam.