A collection of poetic, dreamlike and synesthetic texts.
In 36 Rooms, Zuzanna Bartoszek moves fluidly between short stories and poetic prose, marking a shift away from her earlier poetry.
The collection includes several ekphrastic pieces, responding to paintings by Cyryl Polaczek and Tomasz Kowalski. Though deeply personal, the work often conceals itself in metaphor, or ventures into surreal, dreamlike territory that defies the author's own interpretation. These diverse texts are united by a powerful synaesthesia, an ineffable quality that Bartoszek describes as having "a red brick colour". The collection reflects Bartoszek's evolution beyond her earlier stance that poetry and painting occupy fundamentally separate realms; instead, she now sees them as manifestations of the same creative force, differentiated only by their medium.
Zuzanna Bartoszek (born 1993 in Poznań, Poland, lives and works in Berlin) is an artist and writer whose practice includes painting, drawing, poetry, and prose poetry. Her work has been translated into German, French, and Czech. Her poetry collection, Klucz wisi na Słońcu (The Key Hangs on the Sun), was nominated for the prestigious 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 the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2023), Gaylord Apartments (Los Angeles, 2023), Kunsthalle Zurich (2018), Cell Project Space (London, 2017). An unabashedly avant-garde practitioner, her life story became the subject of a feature film, A Heart of Love (2017), by the renowned Polish director Łukasz Ronduda.
