Goldyn is more than an artist. She is a seer, a scholar, a survivor--and above all, a radical storyteller. Her artistic journey, forged through years of voluntary exile in the forests of Lower Bavaria, is as much about transformation as it is about creation. From raw nature she shaped her palette; from silence she drew her voice.

Her works carry the weight of myth, the urgency of activism, and the intimacy of spiritual confession. At a time when the art world is finally reckoning with the erasure of feminine narratives, Goldyn's reimaginings of Mary Magdalene, Junia, and the "New Human" offer a revolutionary lens.

Through sculpture, installation, and performance, she gives voice to the voiceless, body to the divine, and breath to long-buried truths. Her presence at the 60th Venice Art Biennale with The Walk-in Picture - Maria Magdalena and the Modern: Sensation Book confirmed what insiders have long known: Goldyn is not just part of the conversation--she's leading it.

In Katharina Goldyn, we found a woman who not only walks that path--but builds it, with thorns, stone, faith, and fire. She is not just an artist to watch. She is an artist to witness.

From a remote Bavarian forest to the gilded salons of the Venice Biennale, Polish-born artist and academic Goldyn has forged an artistic language that is both mythic and revolutionary--a deeply personal iconography of liberation, faith, and female power.

A name whispered among collectors and scholars alike, Goldyn does not merely create art. She manifests worlds. Each piece a ritual. Each canvas an invocation. A professor, researcher, and visionary, she is that rare kind of artist who does not just challenge societal norms--she shatters them.

Currently based in Munich, she is the soul behind Studio Zeiler, one of the city's oldest private art institutions. But her path to international acclaim--recently culminating in appearances at Art3f Paris 2025 and a solo show at the Palazzo Cancelleria Vaticana in Rome--was far from linear. If anything, it has been a wild spiritual odyssey through darkness, resilience, and revelation.

Her story begins in Poland, where she studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Czestochowa and the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw. But at 25, diploma in hand, she made a radical pivot--leaving behind the familiar to begin a life in Germany, one that would oscillate between intense artistic immersion and isolating asceticism.

"I often call myself person of the forest," she tells us. "Those years changed everything." For seven years, Goldyn lived in near-total seclusion, buried in the forest of Lower Bavaria. The silence was deafening, the wilderness both merciful and merciless. "It was magical and lonely. A paradox. A cathedral and a cage."

During that time, she married a sculptor 43 years her senior--a partnership as utopian as it was isolating. They lived and worked in an otherworldly house, cut off from the rhythm of society, immersed in a reality that vacillated between artistic freedom and emotional captivity.

"It was both a place of refuge and a prison," she reflects with poetic candour. "There was violence--unpredictable, terrifying. I was blackmailed, frightened. I felt like a prisoner, a slave." And yet, out of this darkness came light.

RECLAIMING THE SACRED FEMININE IN CONTEMPORARY ART

To survive, she returned to the forest--not as a hiding place, but as a collaborator. Trees, thorns, branches, raw earth--these were no longer mere symbols but sacred materials, conduits to a new mythology. Sculpting with marble and timber, sometimes three metres long, with heavy machinery and bare hands, she carved her truth into form. What emerged was not classical beauty, but something older, deeper, and defiantly alive.

"It became the place between heaven and hell," she says. "And from there, I began to see everything anew."

From 2004 to 2014, Goldyn mounted fragments of the forest--soil, limbs of trees--onto canvases and sculptures, creating what she calls "the vegetal cathedral." Even then, her conviction was clear: the future of humanity lies not in circuitry or industry, but in biology, in nature, in the primal pulse of the Earth. But her activism does not stop at ecology. Her work is unflinchingly political.

Between 2012 and 2014, she turned her attention to the criminalization of homosexuality in more than 15 countries. Her art became protest, sanctuary, and sermon. This urgency continues in her series The New Human (ongoing since 2008), where figures--especially women--are reimagined as goddesses of genesis.

Bodies are bold, abundant, divine. Breasts fuse like ancient fertility totems; phalli emerge like relics of a bygone patriarchy. These aren't erotic figures. They're epic ones. Gradually, the series transformed--women stepped into priestly robes. They became female apostles, cardinal-like priestesses, and even Popesses. Here, theology meets feminism in a bold re-interpretation of Catholic iconography.

Among these re-claimed saints is Mary Magdalene. "A misunderstood witness," Goldyn muses. Vilified by centuries of male ecclesiastical power, reduced to a trope, stripped of dignity--until 2016, when Pope Francis restored her name and declared her Apostle of the Apostles. For Goldyn, that rehabilitation is not only historic, but prophetic.

In one of her works, Magdalene is shown pregnant--a quiet yet thunderous allusion to the myth of the Holy Grail, or Sangreal--holy blood. It's a whisper of a legacy, of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as progenitors of a divine bloodline. The implication? That the sacred was always feminine, and that it's time to remember. "It's time," she says, "to wash away the centuries of humiliation. Time to re-establish the voice of women, to give back what was always theirs."

She draws attention, too, to Junia, the apostle whose name was mistranslated for centuries--erased and rewritten as male. Only in the new 2016 translation of the Bible is she rightly restored. "This is the violence of language," Goldyn says. "Even names are stolen." Her work is as timely as it is timeless. "Even today," she notes, "the Taliban continue to erase women. The world is watching, but the silence is still deafening."

Her latest masterwork, unveiled at the 60th Venice Art Biennale in 2024, is nothing short of a spiritual encounter. Titled The Walk-in Picture - Maria Magdalena and the Modern: Sensation Book, the installation transforms traditional viewing into ritual experience. One doesn't merely look at her art--one steps inside it, breathes it, communes with it. It is visual liturgy. Goldyn is not simply an artist. She is a priestess of radical truth, a mystic in marble, a prophetess with pigment. Her work does not ask for your admiration--it asks for your reckoning.

And as she continues to rise across the global art world, from Paris to Rome to Venice, one thing is certain: the future of art--and perhaps of spirit itself--may very well be written in the language of Goldyn.

GOLDYN, Ph.D. is a Munich-based artist from Poland. After graduating Fine Arts in Czestochowa, she continued her studio at the Wroclaw (Breslau) Academy of Fine Arts Department of Painting with Diplom and Master. She obtained a Doctor of Painting and Sculpture from Fine Arts Academy in Wroclaw in 2011. She is owner and Professor of Studio Zeiler--one of the oldest private drawing and painting schools in Munich, which has been in existence for 65 years. She has won several international art prizes, awards, solo exhibitions and participation in more group exhibitions.

www.goldyn.de
@goldynvogl

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