Alicja Biała

Biography
Alicja Biała

Alicja Biała is an Amsterdam-based artist and a graduate of the Royal Drawing School and the Royal College of Art. Raised in a Polish household spanning four generations, she has witnessed a generational dialogue across eight decades—marked by wars, displacements, shifting borders, communism, and collective memory.


Her series Beneath the Soft Ground, Hard Ground presents a collection of zinc and copper plate etchings that resurface fragments of ancestry and cultural tradition. Manipulating these references, often with humor, Biała brings the scars of the past into the present while celebrating its resilience. Folk traditions, paganism, migration, and politics act as recurring themes, forming a dynamic conversation between history and contemporary identity.


Classical in feel yet playful in tone, Biała’s work serves as an exercise in reimagining both history and futurity, posing the question: where might we have been, and where will we go?


Recent exhibitions include 'Raw Earth, Rare Earth' at Berntson Bhattacharjee, London (2025), 'Acid Bite' at the Royal Drawing School, London (2025), Acid Pond at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (2024), and 'this is indeed a wonderful country' at Galerie Hussenot, Paris (2023). In 2024, she created the public sculpture 'The Witch of Chwaliszewo' in Poznań and completed Beneath the Soft Ground, Hard Ground as an installation at the Council of the European Union in Brussels. She has also undertaken residencies including the Arctic Circle Residency Program (2025) and the Versailles–Giverny Foundation residency at the home and gardens of Claude Monet (2024).