“Through watercolour and gold, Agata Przybył transforms the wounds of Warsaw into symbols of beauty and endurance”.
It’s a quiet morning in Warsaw. The light is soft, spilling across the rooftops and settling on the old city’s uneven walls. In a small studio filled with the scent of paper and paint, Agata Przybył is already at work. She leans over a drawing board, her pencil moving carefully along the outline of a cathedral. Then, with a steady hand, she traces a thin line of gold — not to hide a flaw, but to give it meaning. With deliberate grace, she draws a fine golden line across the outline of a cathedral — a gesture that feels less like correction and more like healing. It’s a familiar gesture—part of her ongoing conversation with the city that shaped her.
Agata is an architect by training, a film set designer by profession, and an artist by instinct. Her world lives between blueprints and imagination, where history and beauty intersect in shimmering layers. A graduate of the Faculty of Architecture at the Warsaw University of Technology, she learned to see more than just walls and facades. Under the guidance of professors Henryk Dąbrowski and Ludomir Słupeczański, she discovered that every structure has a soul—that architecture isn’t only about geometry, but about emotion.
That sensibility carried her into the world of cinema, where spaces must tell stories just as powerfully as words or actors do. On set, she became a quiet magician, transforming empty rooms into cinematic worlds that breathe and feel. Her designs for series like Dziewczyny wojenne (War Girls), W głębi lasu (The Woods), and Stulecie Winnych (The Century of the Winny Family) have helped shape the visual identity of modern Polish television. Films like Wilkołak (Werewolf) and Fisheye bear her signature touch—spaces rich with history, shadows, and meaning. Twice, she was awarded the Grand Prix at the “Two Theatres” Festival in Sopot, first in 2012 and again in 2016, for her remarkable scenography.
But when the cameras stop rolling, Agata’s creativity takes another form—quiet, introspective, and deeply personal. With watercolour pencils and shimmering touches of gold paint, she creates drawings that are less about architecture and more about memory. Her ongoing series, Golden Scars of Warsaw, captures the spirit of her city through the delicate, symbolic art of kintsugi—the Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery with gold.
In her hands, the philosophy becomes a visual language. Cracked walls become veins of light. Broken facades are traced with gold, their wounds turned to beauty. Or Agata, Warsaw itself is a living embodiment of kintsugi—a city shattered by war, lovingly pieced together again by its people. “A broken object, once repaired, becomes even more valuable,” she says softly. “Warsaw’s scars are not something to hide—they are proof of its strength, its resilience, its soul.”
Her recent exhibition at Konopacki Palace, Golden Scars of Warsaw, drew visitors who lingered quietly before each piece, seeing their own stories reflected in the gold lines that glimmered across the paper. St. Alexander’s Church, the National Philharmonic, the Polish Post Office, St. John’s Cathedral—all reborn through her eyes, not as ruins, but as testaments to endurance. Agata’s art is, above all, an act of empathy. It speaks of how cities remember, how people heal, and how beauty can emerge from what once was broken. Her drawings invite us to slow down—to look not for perfection, but for meaning in the lines that hold things together.
Today, between film sets and her Warsaw studio, Agata continues to explore the fragile intersection of architecture, memory, and art. Her works shimmer not just with gold, but with gratitude—with the quiet, luminous truth that what survives is often more beautiful for having been broken.
Written by Kamila Krzyzaniak
Images Armand Urbaniak
