Amelia Opalinska, Poland
Contemporary artist based in Mérida, Yucatán
Amelia Opalinska is a contemporary visual artist who has made Mérida, Yucatán her creative home since 2013. Trained in photography—holding a B.F.A. and having exhibited at SITE Santa Fe and The Gerald Peters Gallery—she later transitioned to painting, focusing more intensively on her creative practice after relocating to Mexico. In Mérida, she continues to explore painting, writing, and photography, building a multidisciplinary approach rooted in personal memory, intuition, and visual experimentation.
Artistic Approach and Background
Opalinska’s painting style is expressive and intuitive, with a strong figurative component that often diverges from realistic representation. Her 2023 solo show Trapitos al Sol at El Zapote Gallery marked a turning point, presenting works inspired by intimate personal experiences, many of which occurred in Yucatán. The title—colloquially meaning “airing out one’s laundry”—set the tone for a collection of paintings filled with emotionally charged imagery and visual spontaneity. Using drips, scratches, stains, and irregular brushwork, she builds dynamic compositions where juxtapositions of color and gesture convey energy and vulnerability in equal measure.
This emphasis on personal experience and spontaneous process has remained a central thread across her evolving body of work. Each painting becomes a space where memory and material intuition interact, allowing for unexpected formal outcomes.
Recent Exhibitions and Expanded Practice
From expressive painting to assemblage and installation
While her earlier works focus primarily on painting, Opalinska’s recent projects expand into assemblage and installation, such as the 2024 exhibition *Eyes, Needles, and Fireflies. The Story of Things*. These pieces combine found objects in playful and poetic arrangements, guided by a spontaneous process that privileges intuition over formal structure.
In this context, her work has begun to blur the boundaries between painting and object, creating immersive pieces that retain the gestural immediacy of her canvas-based work.
Her 2025 exhibition Magic Lurks in Color reflects a natural evolution of this visual language: different blocks of color, abstracted figures, and expressive mark-making create contemplative images that retain the emotional depth and intuitive energy present throughout her practice.
“Magic Lurks in Color”.
Amelia Opalinska possesses the ability to intellectualize her creative process and articulate it eloquently through writing.
This dual talent allows audiences not only to admire her paintings but also to connect with her thoughts, enriching their overall experience.
This selection of paintings reflects the shifting phases of the mind, in a time of high productivity demands that can conflict with the tropical climate of Mérida, where persistent heat and humidity often bring a sense of stagnation. These conditions also inspired moments of introspection and creation, essential elements in a challenging 2024.
In the artist’s own words:
“My latest series of paintings embodies the ebbs and flows that mark our days as we make our way through our lives.
Sometimes we are vibrant, motivated, in motion. Eager to explore, experience and create. Other times, especially living in this tropical climate, time can feel stagnant, paused. In those times, I too feel stagnant and paused. Unmotivated to explore externally I turn to look inward and explore the emotional landscapes that lurk below the surface, process and analyze.
These phases that life moves through, motion and idleness, exploration and introspection, creation and stagnation all belong and are necessary. And if through it all I can slow down and pay attention, magic lurks. Sometimes, I have access to this magic.
The brush moves by forces unseen, the mind lost in the flow of the moment, no longer analyses, plots nor demands. Series ofpaintings is a representation of all of these phases. Moments marked by hues, shapes and saturations.”
