Winston Chmielinski

Meet The Artist:

Winston Chmielinski

21 July 2026

Meet The Artist:

Winston Chmielinski

21 July 2026

Q: You once said art is “a magic mirror; it shows you everything you want and don’t want to see.” What has your own work shown you that you did and didn’t want to see?  

A: Yeah, I stand by that. What I saw in my work made me want to destroy it. I spent a couple of years actually unlearning my own style, and then took a four-year break because the slate was so clean I had no desire to put anything back on it. But what’s so humbling, and beautiful, and also kind of scary, is that people who’ve known me from the first paintings to now still see some sort of “essence” in all of them. For better or for worse, there’s a part of us that is original and unchangeable and always there. Now I’m keen on training that literacy beyond reading “art” - life is a constant stream of gestures, and there’s something honest and reflective behind every one of them.

Q: Your work has an ethereal sense of lightness and tranquillity, almost like frozen nostalgia. Does this feeling help you in your work, and what do you hope people feel when they see it?  

A: I know the physics of painting is literally about putting down layers, but the feeling I have is that I’m lifting, and sifting, and suspending, like the soft brushing of an archaeologist. I was obsessed with the idea of archaeology as a kid. Being the one to touch something that hasn’t been touched for millennia. As for nostalgia… yes, very much of this world, and yet not of this time.

"Some spatial experiences have left such an impression on me that they never became memories, they just became permanent fixtures of my “now.” They are accessible when I need them, and that is what I paint. Windows onto those threshold spaces."

Q: You enjoy selecting and buying different fabrics. What’s special about that?  

A: Ok so the tower of Babel fell and we stopped understanding each other. But everyone speaks fabric. It’s a language that generates infinite diversity without losing mutual intelligibility. That’s why I love it. The more something has been touched and considered, the greater its capacity to hold and disseminate meaning. Since fabric has been touched by everyone at all times, and contains within it so many of mankind's innovations on a circuitry of plant fibers and animal hairs… it just feels like an endless font of information and inspiration.

Q: You’re working on a new fashion collection. Where does your desire to enter fashion come from?  

A: I used to feel shame about how bad my grasp of anatomy was as a painter. It’s no coincidence that when I started making clothes, I stopped painting figures. 

I realize in retrospect that my relationship to the figure has been less anatomical and more about its aura. Clothing sits on your aura first, body second; silhouette is the space that feels just right between skin and fabric, and your aura is marked by the lines created and the movement accommodated. This auric study is what interests me far more than painting anatomically. It’s a study in the invisible body that extends beyond your skin and into the world.  

Q: How did your encounter with Ai Weiwei come about, and what made you want to work with him?  

A: It was an opportunity that came up at a time when I felt lonely as a studio artist and wanted to engage with people and global topics. He took me in on faith and feeling. There are people at all levels who act from their gut, and give others the benefit of the doubt, and I’m deeply moved by that. I got to see how an artist of his caliber and scale operates. That’s been a theme of my life: to see how things work first-hand. Only through direct experience do I have a better idea of what I want for my own life—I can’t take anyone’s word for anything.  

Ai Weiwei exposed me to the atmosphere at the top. Low oxygen, high visibility.  

Working for him marked the beginning of a seven year period of dissolving constraints I had outgrown, and now I live a life that affords me the time and space to pursue my interests in absolute depth and breadth.

Q: What does Berlin give artists, and what is it still lacking?

A: Berlin is like a wash of burnt umber.

It’s a neutral ground for me, and I think neutrality, as the basis of a relationship, is kind of a penultimate experience in this life. So many times we’re driven by love and hate and magnetism and repulsion, but I never felt that with Berlin. Here I was able to explore inwardly without the pressure to immediately re-define everything. I think that experience is so rare in life, and I feel lucky to have had it. But I think it’s time for love now. My Berlin life is so un-Berlin that it could really happen anywhere, which begs the question, why here? I think I’m done with burnt umber and covet cerulean blue or emerald green.