Nina Ołtarzewska (b.1998) is a French/Polish artist based in London. They briefly attended the Panthéon Sorbonne’s Fine Art course before moving to Northern Ireland where they graduated with a BFA in 2021 from the Belfast School of Art. They received graduate awards from Pollen Studios, PS², Platform Arts, the University of Atypical and Bbeyond. They became a part of the Emerging Artists Programme at Flax Art Studios upon graduating and received three awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, to fund research and exhibitions. In 2022 they moved to London to pursue an MA Fine Art at the Chelsea College of Art, for which they received the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship, and graduated with distinction in 2024. They received Arts Council England’s DYCP Award in 2024 was Artist in Residence at Blackhorse Workshop in early 2025.

For enquiries please contact oltnska@gmail.com

metal is my friend. i am an artist and fabricator, i make furniture and installation work, i perform! i sing, i move

i make structures that are the size of you or me, allowing for the possibility of physical interaction

because i am interested in how the body behaves- how it reacts to constriction, to digital novelty, to pain

how it enables the formation of identity, what it allows us to explore for ourselves and what it decides for us

a lot of my work is inspired by my catholic upbringing, informed by my experiences of womanhood and queerness

the work I create echoes dangerous or unsafe environments, spaces in which true feelings were unwelcome in childhood

I like to claw at how belief forms when subjected to different versions of reality (and its distortion through subjective viewpoints, images, memories)

i want to create a space in which you are left to question the structural integrity of your own belief systems.

but ultimately, aren’t you tired of being lied to?

i can’t KNOW what i make work about- i think that’s for you to decide.