A Polish street artist Jola Kudela working under a street name Yola.
She specialises in large scale paste-ups, featuring classical paintings recreated using contemporary models. She combines her passion for renaissance art with her skills in image manipulation and digital composition. She studied animation and visual effects at the Polish National Film School in Lodz and, while not doing street art, she works in the movie industry as a CGI visual supervisor and compositing artist.
In her street-art installations she uses classical (renaissance, symbolist or realist) paintings as reference to create modern images with contemporary models. Her images create a dialogue with their urban environment, as well as engage the audience by providing a social commentary.
She uses models from all walks of life, various ethnic backgrounds, professions and sexual orientations. In her art she aims to transgress the barriers of nationality, race and social strata.
She started her street art career with small pieces on the streets of Paris and Brighton, moving onto a large series of “Renaissance street art” in Warsaw, Poland (autumn 2010). In May 2011 she recreated a Polish symbolist masterpiece Vicious Circle in a large scale paste-up piece in Buenos Aires. In October 2011, as part of the Parisian cultural event Nuit Blanche, she created a massive 140m2 image on a 3-storey building located in a busy boulevard of Paris. It was done simultaneously with a Polish event Forty Forty in Warsaw. While in Australia in January 2012, she produced a series of paste-ups in the famous street-art lanes of Melbourne (Hosier Lane among others), as well as ran a street-art workshop with Blender Studios and Signal 37 project, which resulted in a collaborative paste-up in Union Lane. In 2013 she completed a street art project with local community of Loughborough Junction in South London, UK.
