Paulina Olowska was born in 1976 in Gdansk, Poland, and lives and works in Rabka Zdroj and Krakow. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) from 1995-1996. Between1997-2000 she studied painting and graphic arts in the painting department of the Fine Arts Academy in Gdańsk. She has received scholarships from prestigious art institutions in The Hague, Lisbon, Kitakyushu and Amsterdam.

Paulina Olowska often works with references from the past that appear in her pieces as ghosts and apparitions, vibrations of another era that interfere with her pictorial creations. She is interested in the artistic utopia of modernism, which can be found in the principles of the early Bauhaus, in the circles of Russian constructivists and in the creative quest of the European avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. She also finds inspiration in the art of the 1960s and1970s.

Olowska has had one-person exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. She received the prestigious Aachen Art Prize in 2014, with an associated exhibition at the Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Germany. She has also staged performances at Tate Modern, the Carnegie International, and the MoMA, New York. Olowska presented the ballet Slavic Goddesses—A Wreath of Ceremonies at The Kitchen, New York, in 2017 and Slavic Goddesses and The Ushers at the Museo del Novecento in Milan in 2018. Her work was featured in the 2017 National Gallery of Victoria Triennial in Melbourne and the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, as well as in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; mumok, Vienna; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Migros Museum Für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; and the New Museum, New York.