Katerina Tsitsela doesn’t paint the outside world. She paints what’s going on underneath. Her work is driven by mood, by perception, by the way emotions take shape inside the body. Based in Greece, she works in both painting and engraving, moving fluidly between the two. What stays constant is her focus on the inner landscape. “Internal landscapes,” she calls them—states of mind translated into color, gesture, and space. Less about what you see, more about what you sense.
Her art isn’t about telling a story. It doesn’t unfold in steps or offer neat conclusions. Tsitsela is more interested in what can’t be easily explained. Her paintings read like emotional weather—shifting, layered, hard to pin down. They land before you even realize what they’re doing.
One recent oil painting from 2024 shows a nude woman tangled within a rush of flowers. There’s no title, and that feels right. You’re not being asked to interpret—you’re being asked to enter. The woman’s body doesn’t rest on top of the blossoms; it rises from them. Her figure and the flowers seem to be formed by the same motion, the same breath. There’s nothing decorative here. The blooms don’t soften the image—they charge it. There’s tension, beauty, rawness. It feels like nature and the human body are in a shared state: open, vulnerable, fully alive.
Another work from the same year, also untitled, moves in the opposite direction. Still a nude figure. Still centered. But this time, she’s alone in a void of color—no surroundings, no visual noise. Her stance is simple. Her gaze turned inward. She’s not posed or stylized. She’s just there. Present.
This painting works like a quiet ache. Nothing about it shouts, but it doesn’t need to. The emotional weight is there in her stance, in the way the paint gathers around her. Tsitsela isn’t trying to dramatize solitude—she just lets it sit. And that honesty gives the piece its gravity. You’re not meant to observe this woman. You’re meant to pause with her.
Then there’s the painting of her studio—oil on paper. It’s not a literal room, more like the memory of one. The whole image is soaked in green. Not one soft shade, but many, layered and changing—like thoughts circling back on themselves. The brushwork doesn’t map out details; it traces the space as it feels rather than how it looks.
There’s something personal about the piece, but not in an obvious way. The room holds presence. It holds time. You can feel the silence in it, but it’s not cold. It’s more like waiting. This isn’t a portrait of a workspace—it’s a reflection of what it means to sit with your ideas, to stay with them through the long process of making. The space turns into another kind of figure—empty but alive.
Across these three works, Tsitsela avoids giving us closure. She doesn’t wrap emotion up with answers. She leaves things open, unresolved. And that’s the strength of her art. It lets emotion be what it is—messy, layered, sometimes beautiful, sometimes uncomfortable.
There are no titles to lead you. That’s on purpose. A title would box it in, suggest a direction. Tsitsela prefers her paintings to float, to shift depending on who’s looking. They aren’t declarations. They’re mirrors.
She’s not chasing perfection. Her paintings don’t aim to be polished or easy. They aim to be true—to capture the weight of feelings most of us carry but rarely talk about. She gives those feelings shape and color. Not to explain them. Just to make room for them.
Katerina Tsitsela’s work isn’t asking to be understood. It’s asking to be felt.
