What the River Brings, Anna Tymińska’s latest exhibition, emerges from the landscape of Kurpiowszczyzna and the valleys of the Pisa River and Narew River. The river, forest, sand, and light form a space that becomes the source of a painterly narrative. Here, the landscape takes on a profound significance. It becomes a living organism, a vessel of memory, and a record of continuous transformation.

Anna Tymińska’s practice is rooted in attentiveness. The artist focuses on the rhythms of nature, the movement of water, light, and the material structure of the environment. She captures the swirl on the river’s surface, the movement of grasses in the wind, reflections of light, and traces left by the current. Each observation leads to a deeper experience of place and reveals its inner energy.

In the works presented, the human figure exists in close relation to its surroundings. The figures absorb the light, color, and rhythm of the landscape, becoming part of its natural order. The silvery shimmer of water, the greens of the grasses, and the pulse of nature create a coherent and contemplative reality. Anna Tymińska’s paintings invite reflection on the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as on memory embedded in the landscape.

An important extension of the exhibition is Fragments, a series of five reliefs crafted from silver-plated brass. Each object incorporates authentic elements of the landscape: black oak, amber, stone, shell, and clay. Each of them holds the history of a place. What the River Brings becomes a meditation on landscape as a keeper of time, preserving memory and carrying traces of successive layers of nature and human experience.

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For earlier generations, religious, historical and literary imagery formed a shared visual language. Today, that language also includes video games, films, television series and images circulating through internet culture. Grupa Dowczoraj draws on this repertoire of contemporary signs and transforms it into painterly narratives about memory, attention and experience.

The artist’s work emerges from the visual landscape of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Familiar characters, scenes and situations are removed from their original contexts and brought together in new constellations. CJ from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas appears alongside Hagrid from the world of Harry Potter, enters the iconic interior of the Polish sitcom Świat według Kiepskich and stands beneath the “Strefa Ruchu” sign, which evolved from a piece of urban infrastructure into an icon of contemporary popular culture through a widely recognised photograph of rappers Kaz Bałagane and Belmondo. Literature, television, music, internet culture and everyday life coexist here within a shared imaginative space.
A significant part of the exhibition is devoted to a series of beach scenes. Its protagonist is fully absorbed in the simple act of digging a hole in the sand. A seemingly trivial goal gradually captures his complete attention. The paintings resemble holiday postcards recording moments of concentration, observation, childlike determination and first romantic awakenings. Within this ordinary situation emerges a distinctly human ability to assign meaning to things that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Anonymity constitutes one of the foundations of Grupa Dowczoraj’s artistic practice. The group embraces it at a time when a name, image and personal narrative have become conditions of visibility. The author steps aside and allows the work to take centre stage. Viewers encounter the paintings directly, building their own associations and interpretations.
Grupa Dowczoraj’s work reflects on the ways contemporary culture creates new forms of shared experience. Alongside grand narratives, we encounter video game characters, cinematic figures, internet symbols and scenes drawn from everyday life. Together, they form a landscape in which the emotions, memories and imagination of a generation are continuously shaped and renewed.

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HANS BELLMER, OLGA DMOWSKA, EDWARD DWURNIK, DANIEL GRÉMI, KATARZYNA GÓRNA, KATARZYNA KOZYRA, KATERYNA LYSOVENKO, MONIKA MISZTAL, KRZYSZTOF RENES, TADEUSZ ROLKE, AGATA SŁOWAK, ESTEVÃO DA SILVA CONCEIÇÃO, ANDRZEJ URBANOWICZ, JAKUB JULIAN ZIÓŁKOWSKI, PAWEŁ ŻUKOWSKI

Every human being is involved in the great socio-historical processes that take place in their country; every person is, in a certain way, entangled in the transformations of the world and its conflicts occurring in the epoch in which they live. Every human being participates in the culture of their age and is subject to the intellectual and emotional reality produced by the knowledge of their time. And each is assigned a path of social and professional life, according to the plans of economic development and the social division of labour in their country. Every individual is, in a certain way, an element of larger wholes, and every “I” is always incorporated into various forms of “we.”

Bogdan Suchodolski, The Shape of Life, 1979

The title of the exhibition derives from a book I received in 2000 in Zamość from my neighbor, Wiesława Pokoca. Five years later, I encountered a painting by Edward Dwurnik. Do we have to live exactly as we do? I still recall this question from the opening chapter, returning at moments when I sought to understand the impulse to collect, to preserve, and to reconfigure the world. The collection emerges from a practice of attentive looking and deliberate choice. Each work carries an experience of time, the body, and memory. Together, they form a space in which life reveals its complexity and depth.

Building a collection is a process of recognizing and reactivating meaning. Art enriches life by translating the experience of the world from its external dimension into an internal one. It allows us to see more, and to see more deeply, while opening new registers of experience within ourselves. In encountering a work, one comes closer to oneself, more intensely and more fully, while undergoing a transformation that expands awareness. Images and objects become sites of encounter in which reality acquires a renewed dimension.

The works presented in the exhibition articulate life through the body, memory, perception, and imagination. In the works of Hans Bellmer and Andrzej Urbanowicz, the body becomes a site of tension, fragmentation, and projection, establishing a point of departure for further transformations. Katarzyna Górna and Katarzyna Kozyra shift this terrain toward questions of subjectivity and social violence, reclaiming a voice for lived experience. Agata Słowak, Monika Misztal, and Olga Dmowska extend this field through intensity, affect, and embodied presence. At the same time, Edward Dwurnik and Tadeusz Rolke anchor this narrative in everyday life, memory, and the concrete realities of social existence. Kateryna Lysovenko introduces the condition of war and the tension between violence and the imagination of freedom. Jakub Julian Ziółkowski and Paweł Żukowski open a space of imagination, dream, and transformation, in which reality is continuously reconfigured. Estevão da Silva Conceição brings an organic and existential dimension, constructing his world through material, labor, and lived experience. Together, these works form a polyphonic reflection on the human condition, in which the tension between the individual and the collective, between the visible and the imagined, reveals the shape of life.

Contemporary reality is marked by acceleration, excess, and intensifying tensions that increasingly translate into a lived sense of uncertainty. In this context, the ability to pause and to inhabit the present moment with awareness becomes essential. Art opens a space of concentration and depth in which it becomes possible to regain inner balance, but also to perceive others and acknowledge their experience. It creates a form of community grounded in presence, where encounters unfold through image, form, and imagination. Within this space, one remains oneself while learning to perceive oneself in relation to others.

The exhibition presents life as a process unfolding through forms, gestures, and relations. The collection becomes both a record of time and a way of understanding it. It arises from individual choices and personal experiences that gradually coalesce into a shared structure of meaning. What is singular gains clarity and remains legible in relation to the whole. Life emerges gradually, through decisions, encounters, and images that remain within us and return over time. It is precisely within this process, between the “I” and the “we,” that its shape becomes visible.

CURATOR: Michał Borowik

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From time to time, art history encounters “tough cases”: artists, works and careers that veer off the beaten track, that challenge art history’s usual analytical tools, resist its exegetical grip. There are many reasons for this. The artist’s life may have been enigmatic; their output rarefied or, on the contrary, excessive; their oeuvre too repetitive, or varied; it may have remained hidden from view for a long time. Tomasz Żołnierkiewicz (1935–2018) is certainly one of these tough cases.

Although he taught for many years at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (and became Stefan Gierowski’s assistant in 1962), he seems to have remained on the fringes of the art world. In many ways, his life was that of an outsider. Although he taught at the academy, he didn’t just work there, he also lived there. For a period of his life, the waiting room at Warsaw Central Station was his bedroom. An illuminating anecdote: one day, he splashed paint on Tadeusz Kantor, because Kantor embodied authority in the world of Polish art. It’s likely that, in Żołnierkiewicz’s eyes, art history as such constituted a form of dominant evaluative authority that embarrassed him. He himself seems to have refused to take his place in it. The testimony of his former students reveals that he was reluctant to show his works. So it was essentially by hearsay that his work acquired a form of existence, although it could only be furtive, slipping under the radar.

To top it off, a flood in the late 1980s destroyed all his previous pictorial output stored in his studio on Lwowska Street in Warsaw—depriving him of a past, a beginning, or rather, leaving him with only the beginnings of a poster artist (he was very active in this field). This incident undoubtedly contributed to making Żołnierkiewicz definitively indifferent to any historical perspective. It is said that the stories he liked to tell were in no way chronological. In other words, his painting seemed to have programmed its own demise, seemingly destined to take shape later only in the imagination of a novelist rather than under the inquisitive eye of the art historian. And yet it does exist, with several hundred paintings now likely to be presented to a public that will ignore the mythology surrounding the eccentric art professor, a mythology that is all-pervasive for those who knew him. But how should these paintings be viewed?

The discovery of this corpus raises an initial question. What works preceded it? What was Żołnierkiewicz painting in the late 1960s or the following decade? We come to imagine that some of the works visible today may have been “remakes” of paintings destroyed when the studio flooded. Many of them are undated, as if the artist had no concern for the historical record or knew that any date would be false, the original lost to the flood and memory alike.

The second feeling that arises from viewing this group of paintings is its great stylistic diversity: it seems to be the work of several authors. It’s true that many artists change style in the course of their lives—Gerhard Richter, to take a contemporary of Żołnierkiewicz’s, is a superlative example—but either these changes are determined by the logical sequence of causes and consequences that affect the course of an artist’s life, or, as in Richter’s case, they are part of the work’s very aesthetic program. Żołnierkiewicz’s activity as a poster artist certainly predisposed him to stylistic diversity, but the variety in his painting cannot be considered from this angle alone. It’s important to understand that the gesture of splashing Kantor with paint has a deeper meaning than simply rejecting the artistic establishment. The words “author” and “authority” share the same etymology: the Latin verb augere, meaning “to bring into being, to increase”; the author is the person who possesses the authority to perform a creative act. When Żołnierkiewicz challenged Kantor’s authority, he was in a sense expressing his refusal to be an “author” in the same way that Kantor, a famous painter and playwright, was one. And to avoid being an author, there are two possible solutions: either do nothing at all—that is the figure of the artist without an oeuvre—or become several authors. In a famous text, Roland Barthes proclaimed “the death of the author”: the meaning of a work cannot be defined solely through its attribution to an author; it depends at least as much on its ever-renewed reception by the reader or spectator. It is not certain that Barthes’s thesis can be fully applied to the case of Żołnierkiewicz. Nonetheless, the heterogeneity of Żołnierkiewicz’s painting seems to manifest a splintering, a dissolution of the author. What authority could an author have over his work when it is so diverse? This is clearly one of the most singular and significant dimensions of Żołnierkiewicz’s art.

This disempowerment of the artist’s authority must be seen in relation to a dominant characteristic of his painting: the modesty of his formats and means. Indeed, many of his works are small, and he often used recycled materials—wooden boards found here and there, the uprights of old stretchers, or pieces of upholstery or household fabric—and employed the cheapest paints. Economic considerations or the small dimensions of his studio could explain this state of affairs. It should be noted, however, that when he felt the need to work on large canvases, he was able to find the right materials. Could these modest formats be the result of purely aesthetic choices? If, for example, it’s hard to imagine Giorgio Morandi employing monumental canvases for his still lifes, the content of Żołnierkiewicz’s paintings doesn’t necessarily imply a reduced format. In other words, insofar as it makes sense, this aspect of his painting is undoubtedly more ethical than aesthetic. This kind of modesty of practice is one of the expressions of his distrust of authority.

But what are these paintings that Żołnierkiewicz was reluctant to show, that he produced on modest means? How varied are their styles? In short, what do they look like? Colored rays, horizontal in some paintings, vertical in others, or sometimes circular. Dots of varying size, sometimes turning into blobs. Lines of words written all over. And a few other things. It’s impossible to determine the exact chronology of these different series. More than likely, Żołnierkiewicz worked on several of them at the same time.

The group of luminous ray paintings is the most quantitatively important part of the work, and surely the most “iconic.” It is very difficult to determine precisely when Żołnierkiewicz began painting them. This part of his painting links it very closely to that of Stefan Gierowski. In 1964, Gierowski began a series of paintings in which his abstraction takes a resolutely cosmic turn. In the second half of the 60s, Gierowski’s cosmic reveries found expression in paintings made up of luminous and colored rays, such as CXCVII. These paintings are heirs to Mikhail Larionov’s Rayonism, according to which forms subsist only as rays of light. Żołnierkiewicz’s ray paintings often adopt the principle of symmetry: a central ray and, on either side, several rays of other colors. In some paintings, however, the same ray is repeated over the entire surface of the canvas, sometimes giving the illusion of extending out of the frame. Sometimes a single ray crosses the canvas. What’s unusual about these paintings is that the gradation surrounding the ray produces, in some cases, a three-dimensional effect that transforms the ray into a cylinder. In front of them, we think of Getulio Alviani’s Superfici a testura vibratile [Vibratile-Textured Surfaces] in aluminum, where the milling of the aluminum sheet generates light effects that give rise to a three-dimensional illusion of a cylinder; or the 1970s paintings by Kazys Varnelis. In this way, Żołnierkiewicz’s paintings oscillate between the flatness of strip painting (in Kenneth Noland, Bridget Riley or André Beullens, for example) and the illusion of relief, of spatial depth, between Rayonism and “Tubism,” to use the word defining the variant of Cubism invented by Fernand Léger. Żołnierkiewicz seems intent on experimenting with different possible options based on the Rayonist model bequeathed by Gierowski’s painting: the ray of light, the flatness of the band, or the relief of the cylinder. Paintings with concentric circles in multiple colors are another version of this Rayonism. Instead of being seen in its length, the ray of light is represented at its source. In Poland, such paintings immediately call to mind Wojciech Fangor, but it would be more legitimate to associate them with the work of Kenneth Noland or Minoru Onoda, and even more certainly with Peter Sedgley. Żołnierkiewicz’s concentric-circle disks, like his monochrome tondos, are mostly small-scale, and they appear almost more like exhibition props than paintings in their own right.

In Żołnierkiewicz’s work, Pointillist paintings coexist with Rayonist ones, just as in the work of Gierowski, who as early as 1970 asked the point to bring color to life without recourse to form, but also as in Piero Dorazio. It seems that Żołnierkiewicz wanted to test the various possibilities offered by this abstract Pointillism: dots of a single color distributed in such a way as to give rise to a form or not; the mixture of dots of different colors; the overlay of two dot screens slightly misaligned with each other; the enlargement of the dot to the blob. One day, the history of abstract Pointillism will need to be written—a history in which Gierowski and Dorazio play major roles, but no less so Kuno Gonschior, who entrusted the fate of his entire oeuvre to the dot. Although the ray and dot paintings are quite dissimilar, the coherence that links the particle to the ray exists and has already been perceived by other artists. The word paintings, on the other hand, belong to a totally different aesthetic universe.

In all likelihood, Żołnierkiewicz undertook his first word paintings at the turn of the 21st century. These large-format paintings appear as palimpsests: lines of words drawn with a brush, difficult to decipher, covering other lines of words across the entire surface of the canvas; the two strata of writing have different colors. It’s easy to see how wide the gap is between ray and dot paintings and these “Lettrist” paintings. Żołnierkiewicz’s paintings are reminiscent of the “hypergraphy” of Lettrist artists such as Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître. From the second half of the 1940s onwards, hypergraphy—the plastic use of language—was seen as an overcoming of both abstraction and figuration. But it is hardly possible to attribute this meaning to Żołnierkiewicz. Various accounts agree that the painter talked a lot, pouring out often uncontrolled streams of words. Should we then simply see in these paintings another way of pouring out this excessive speech? Is Żołnierkiewicz’s Lettrism based purely on compulsion? Do these illegible palimpsests emblemize a refusal to allow the hermeneutic to get the last word? Or should we see it as one of the pictorial forms that history has made available to painters?

Ray paintings, dot paintings, word paintings. But Żołnierkiewicz didn’t stop there. Among his many other creations are the astonishing quasi-monochrome canvases, all four corners of which are marked by a small sawtooth shape, almost reminiscent of a canvas key. These cartoonish paintings require the eye to choose whether to focus on the corners or the center of the canvas. Depending on the option chosen, the effect produced by the painting will change considerably. Two gray paintings should also be mentioned here, where small nails are depicted as if hammered into the canvas in a few places. The alliance of monochrome and hyperrealism, of the mythical ultimate painting of History, as Aleksandr Rodchenko intended it, and of the vulgar little utensil lying around the studio.

Żołnierkiewicz was very interested in music. He listened to a lot of it. In particular, he admired Witold Lutosławski, whom he even went so far as to compare with Stefan Gierowski, for reasons known only to him. His interest is significant because music, at least the music he loved, is an art of performance: there is a score that the musician will have to interpret. Like the pianist Krystian Zimerman proposing a specific interpretation of the score of Chopin’s Ballades or Debussy’s Préludes, or the conductor Antoni Wit of a Mahler symphony, Żołnierkiewicz, as a painter, puts himself in the position of interpreter rather than composer. He offers an interpretation of Rayonism, stripe painting, dot painting, or Lettrist painting. Żołnierkiewicz’s position as a painter is in line with his artistic philosophy, as an interpreter is clearly in a less authoritative position than the composer. We must view Żołnierkiewicz as an interpreter of “scores” provided to him by art history.

And there is every reason to believe that he thought of his own painting as open to interpretation. According to some accounts, his studio was filled with paintings that he arranged in variable configurations. He saw each piece as something capable of interacting with others. None of them aimed to assert themselves as absolute entities—that is, in the etymological sense, as fully isolated from everything around them. Żołnierkiewicz’s work thus comes before us today less as a corpus for philological examination than as a set of paintings to be performed in an exhibition.

CURATOR: Michel Gauthier

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Małgorzata Mycek, Zuzanna Romańska, Helena Stiasny & Ola Szczodry

Try as I might, despite my homosexuality and queerness, I’m still a white cisgender man from Europe – a privileged inhabitant of patriarchy, living in a part of the world where questions of survival are rarely pressing. From this position, like those similarly situated, I often think about the Roman Empire. Men do that. We’ve known this for sure for at least two years now – thanks to TikTok and not only. It’s worth acknowledging.

There’s a sculpture that’s been stuck in my head since I was a child. And yes – a child can absolutely be disturbed by sculptures. Ancient ones, for example. At the beginning of the 4th century AD, the Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs was made. It’s an ancient sculpture that somehow doesn’t feel ancient at all. The figures look stiff and synthetic, almost block-like, pressed tightly together in an awkward group hug. Four rulers of the empire sharing power under Diocletian’s reforms – at the same time when mosaics were still depicting stories of Heracles, sacred fires burned in temples of Vesta, and Sophocles’ plays were staged in theatres. And yet these four figures, each holding a sword, look as if they came from the future. From the dark time that historians say followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire, when Odoacer overthrew the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476. But that date is really just a convenient marker. History doesn’t end neatly. Civilisations don’t collapse overnight in one fell swoop.

I’ve always felt that antiquity ended later – maybe symbolically with the closure of the Platonic Academy in 529. Or, if we abandon the male-centred narratives of warriors toppling rulers and rulers expelling philosophers, then in 415, with the death of Hypatia. Or maybe even earlier – when an unknown artist somewhere in northern Egypt carved the Four Tetrarchs out of expensive, stubborn porphyry, unknowingly predicting what was to come.

Like Hypatia’s death. I often think about her – this scientist and philosopher from Alexandria who watched her world fall apart in real time. Libraries and temples were burning, yet she kept teaching in public. She passed on knowledge and ethical ideas built up over centuries. Pagans and Christians both came to listen. Two opposing worlds, still able – for a moment – to share the same intellectual ground. That kind of world could have survived. But Hypatia became a victim of political and religious power struggles. Educated and respected, she became the perfect radical Other in a world shaped by conflicts between men – a scapegoat whose death could serve to found a new order. She was accused of witchcraft. Simple logic: she knew too much, so she must have been a witch. That logic she didn’t know. She was murdered publicly. Her body torn apart. Her eyes – the same eyes that had seen her civilisation disappear – gouged out.

Maybe that’s why the Tetrarchs don’t really look powerful, even though they’re armed. They cling to one another, as if scared. A group bound together by fear, frozen in red stone. Maybe they sensed what was ahead. After Rome fell, they were moved to Constantinople, their identities changed. Later, after the Crusades – and after one of them lost a foot – they ended up in Venice. They’re still there today, standing in St Mark’s Square, surrounded by crowds of tourists in a city that will one day sink into the sea. That image haunts me.

The lack of peace is shared by all of us. By you too. And by Małgorzata Mycek, Zuzanna Romańska, Helena Stiasny and Aleksandra Szczodry – artists who, through painting, record not only another moment of civilisational crisis, but also changes in reality that are hard to put into words. Language struggles to describe them. Painting steps in where speech fails. Their works go beyond personal stories and familiar symbols, pushing past the frame and spilling outward. Like in Stiasny’s paintings, where a naked Valkyrie charges straight at the viewer, while Europa has already tamed the bull. This feminist retelling of myths and archetypes also shows up in Szczodry’s work, where the story of Eros and Psyche is read in a new, non-masculine way – as a key to femininity. Romańska takes old cosmologies apart and builds new ones. In her universe, Eastern Europe sits at the centre, and the main characters aren’t heroes, but ordinary women living in an unnamed City. In Mycek’s paintings, figures break away from classical forms and turn into human-animal hybrids. Together, the gestures of all four artists resist easy description. But they don’t ask to be explained – they ask to be felt.

From that affective space, the discourse of Seneca’s Discourses stops mattering much, and Ovid’s complaints from exile in Tomis bring only a sympathetic smile, since the author of the Metamorphoses adapted so badly to change. Unlike the four stone rulers of the past – wedged into a building corner and anxiously facing the future – Mycek, Romańska, Stiasny and Szczodry choose to be fully present. They declare their own republic. Built not from marble columns and flowing togas, but from flesh and blood – from the pulsing tissues that sustain their four-headed form of rule. One whose constitution rejects patriarchy and points toward something new.

And that gives me peace.

AUTHOR OF THE EXHIBITION TEXT: Kamil Kuitkowski

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Where the Pisa River meets the Narew, the waters still follow their natural course. Among meadows, peat bogs and quiet oxbows, Anna Tymińska paints. Her work intertwines the landscape of the Kurpie region with the rhythm of daily life – walking, observing, noticing the delicate enchantments hidden in ordinary forms along the way. Attentiveness to what is subtle, mysterious and easily overlooked becomes the pulse of her painting.

Tymińska’s canvases capture the moment when vision softens, when the senses are quietly reprogrammed and contours dissolve. Movement and rhythm begin to outweigh form. It is a state of suspension, where thought loses its edge, the gaze drifts, and consciousness drifts through quiet currents. Her paintings reconstruct this altered mode of perception, freed from everyday order. Hence their dreamlike atmosphere: cool silvery greens, moonlit tones, an air of stillness. From this luminous haze emerge female figures with metallic, phosphorescent skin, their gestures and identities resisting clear definition. They are not separate from their surroundings but absorbed within them, blending with the landscape until all boundaries fade. Body and space exist on equal terms. In her vision, corporeality does not stand apart from nature but confirms belonging to it.

Her colours reflect the local world of rivers and fields: mussels whose shells shift between warm and cool browns and blacks, revealing pearly interiors. Unio pictorum, the painter’s mussel, once served as a vessel for pigments. Its very name carries a fragment of history – a shell that holds colour becomes part of the act of painting. In the clear rivers of Poland, these shells still exist. Her compositions, like mussels, unite opposites – the rough and earthen with the luminous and secret, shaped by filtration and intimate contact with water.

In Kurpie stories, water is both boundary and passage. Rivers, ponds and swamps mark the meeting point of the everyday and the supernatural. In their bends dwell water spirits – in Polish folklore known as rusałki and wodnice – who can seduce wanderers into the current or, when treated with respect, offer their protection. The river’s vortex was seen as a force drawing down not only the body but the soul. Marshes held the uncertainty of another world, where each step could open a different reality. The rituals of local people reveal reverence for this element that could both nourish and destroy. As in Slavic mythology, water carries tales of transition – from life to death, from waking to dream, from the known to the hidden. This movement defines Tymińska’s approach to painting: not as a fixed mark, but as a record of change.

Her practice follows the logic of thresholds. The women in her paintings seem caught in suspension, their awareness drifting away from the everyday, as if embodying the legends of water themselves. In their calm faces one senses the echo of a siren’s charm edged with danger, and in the swirling currents around them, an ancient promise of transformation. It is also visible in her technique: the rhythm of the brush shifts – from circular motions to broad, diffused strokes. Here, motion is not an aftereffect but the very spine of composition. The surface thickens, light breaks through successive layers of paint. The shifting patches of colour build the painting’s rhythm – from calm, soft transitions to sudden contrasts. Painting becomes a record of transformation, not an illustration of form. Each layer of paint carries memory of what came before – a memory of body and time. The works are formed through overlaying, erasing and returning, closer to the structure of memory than to traditional composition. The mark of a gesture is not a narrative but evidence of presence.The trace of a gesture becomes a proof of presence rather than a story about it. Her painting exists at the threshold of the visible and the sensed, without seeking to divide them. The gaze is never stable; it drifts, disperses, changes scale. Perception itself becomes part of the work. Tymińska’s method restores the pace of the hand and the eye, honouring a quiet focus on what is here and now. It is a form of resistance to haste and excess, a way of paying attention to simple phenomena. Painting becomes a way of staying within experience – a slow and deliberate process that sustains continuity and concentration, a state that is its own purpose.

Through these works echoes of old myths return – an intuitive turn toward primordial relations with the world. The artist draws upon archaic figures of femininity, invoking ancient bonds with natural forces; her protagonists partake in rituals of passage. They are priestesses, witches, guardians of thresholds, tracing protective circles in the sand. The line drawn across the ground, appearing in one of her paintings, may mark what is close or seek to sense the boundary. This ritual repeats itself in her process – the slow, focused movement that gradually builds an inner order. Through it she summons her own world, where painting becomes a way of feeling and cherishing what is near, fragile and easily missed.

CURATOR: Katarzyna Piskorz

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Ewa Czwartos and Karolina Żądło’s exhibition is a subtle yet incisive interplay with the history of painting and culture—a game that exposes how past depictions of women and their attributes constructed traditional social models, and how the redefinition of femininity and women’s roles in society reshapes their position and significance in art. The classical beauty in the canvases of these young artists becomes unsettling, charged with surprisingly contemporary meaning. The seeming decorativeness of these works provokes discussion about beauty itself as a tool of power and a means of “sanctifying” violence.

The term “natural” has long been a deceptive label when applied to women—too often synonymous with subservience, silence, and compliance with patriarchal expectations. Nature was invoked to justify inequality, legitimize inferiority, and romanticize subordination. Erased from history and stripped of their past, women were reduced to mere botanical specimens—perhaps the butterfly named Radiant (after one of the Graces), appearing in Ewa Czwartos’s new work, serves as a wry, ironic emblem of these traditional collections. Painterly representations of women were the domain of men, who cast them as goddesses or saints—while the warrior women who have inspired Karolina Żądło since the beginning of her career had no place in the canon. The deliberate reappropriation of faces and bodies from old masters’ canvases, experiments with self-portraiture, and the revival of the classical female nude as a contemporary subject are all attempts to reclaim the female gaze and subvert traditional visual codes.

The women in these paintings—detached yet defiant—stare into a void that is both the future and a legacy of struggle. Their gaze is that of hyper-aware rebels, devoid of enthusiasm or fervor, replaced by a calculated calm—the very calmness once imposed upon them, a demand that became part of their so-called “nature”: a construct designed by the patriarchy to perpetuate its dominance. They appear as vigilant witnesses to the unspeakable—all that was hidden, forbidden, or suppressed, all that was stripped from them or rooted out. The motifs of wildflowers and herbs with which Czwartos and Żądło adorn or brand their figures offer a sharp, incisive commentary on the laws of nature that have long underpinned unequal social relations. The women who occasionally posed as Venus or the Graces were, in truth, treated as territory—cultivated, fenced in, exploited, and conquered. Long dismissed as subjects, they now forge a new identity from the very objectification that sought to define them. A sense of agency surges in these motionless models, spreading like weeds, emerging from their bodies, and coiling into the serpentine tangles of their hair. The Graces hint that they can easily transform into Medusas. Mythology abounds with harrowing examples of this metamorphosis, where the spark of female monstrosity is almost always ignited by sexuality. Raped by a god, then cursed by his divine consort, their rage at this double violation twists their features and whips their hair into frenzy. Medusas ooze venom, terrify, and lash out in a fight for their own survival.

Czwartos and Żądło unleash their imaginations in exploring the symbolism and power of women’s hair—a fraught subject in patriarchal culture. Decorum demanded that respectable women cover their heads, while virgins cut their braids upon marriage. Long hair was deemed dangerous, an untamable force of nature. In Ewa Czwartos’s work, unbound locks morph into lianas—a symbol of tenacious, climbing vines that reach for the forest canopy, ensnaring everything in their path. In Karolina Żądło’s canvases, Medusa’s living hair writhes around naked female figures, accentuating their sensuality while veiling the demonized erogenous zones. To the ancient Greeks, who regarded women as little more than children or livestock, a single strand of Medusa’s hair could send an army fleeing in terror. Her gaze petrified—literally and metaphorically—turning men to stone, a poetic reversal of objectification that hinted at cultural retribution.

Even when confined under a cap or tightly pinned, women’s hair betrays its rebellious nature, escaping in delicate, unruly tendrils—a testament to feminine cunning, the quiet subversion that allowed women, whether unmarried or wed, to navigate the prohibitions of successive eras, including those in art history: an history made without women, not for women, yet populated by women as silent still-life subjects. In her new works, Ewa Czwartos revisits Lucas Cranach’s famous Venus, depicted with Cupid holding a honeycomb and stung by bees—a moralizing allegory where sensual pleasure inevitably brings suffering. Stripping away Cupid, Czwartos multiplies Venus instead. The bees—symbols of punishment—vanish, replaced by a butterfly: liberation, metamorphosis, rebirth. This proliferation of the female figure, an allegory of strength in itself, is also central to Karolina Żądło’s work, which further asserts their individuality by highlighting the diversity of female experience.

A feminist reinterpretation of archetypes and symbols unites these artists, who engage in a shared dialogue with a common purpose. Drawing from painting traditions—a vast repository of signs, attributes, and poses—they seek to restore a herstorical perspective. They rewrite old narratives, shift meanings, and craft new myths and heroines. By deconstructing cultural images of women, they interrogate the visual language of femininity. Ewa Czwartos, who also works in animation, boldly reconfigures faces and body parts from masterpieces, duplicating and sequencing them in a process reminiscent of stop-motion. Blending filmic techniques with painting is a playful yet pointed gesture, reflecting how the present reconfigures our understanding of history. Yet beyond these technical experiments, the paintings evoke a metaphysical chill. The artists’ contemporary approach is a deliberate, ever-fresh subversion of decorum. Omnipresent ribbons, beads, and lace introduce an undercurrent of menace—there is genuine perversion, threatening associations, dark humor, and, tellingly, a hint of melancholy, perhaps because the artists mean every word. From the outset, Karolina Żądło has experimented with the motif of female armor—sometimes diaphanous, sometimes ornamental—a subversive strategy that co-opts the system’s own weapons against it. In this way, the “traditional” painting of both artists becomes a radical new space for engaged art. Here, however, the potency of the message is delivered through classical “pure beauty”—and perhaps this paradox is the key to its uniqueness. Ladies and gentlemen, these are entirely new, timeless works.

CURATOR: JOANNA OPAREK

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In the paintings of Ewa Czwartos and Karolina Żądło, women do not need to speak loudly to be heard. Their presence resonates in their physical fulness, the emotionality of their gestures, and an inner light. They are intense, irreducible, while they are building a new, bold order of meaning. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from the musical Cabaret, sounds like an ironic reassurance that undermines its own message from the outset. The phrase “no troubles here” does not describe reality but rather refers to an imposed script that taught women to remain silent. The artists adopt it only to invalidate it. The protagonists of the works return to the visual space with full awareness, refusing to remain in the background.

They recall figures from icons, tapestries, altarpieces, fairy tales, myths, and TV series, but do not recreate old roles. They speak in their own language, where the gaze becomes the beginning of awakening and responsibility, not a path to innocence.

Every detail — a braid, a drape, an object, or a gesture — is a clue and never merely decorative. Together, they form a new alphabet, where aesthetics do not serve to embellish but to build tension and meaning with precision. The painting of Czwartos and Żądło does not shout, nor does it impose a story. Instead, it leads the viewer through a ritual of attentiveness, where repetition, multiplication, borrowing, and subtlety become a language of critique and resistance. Female bodies cease to be objects. They gain materiality, subjectivity, and agency. Their silence, standing in formation, is not a sign of indifference or absence of message, but an act of resistance in a different form. It is a gesture of reclaiming both image and narrative. The space of these works becomes a field of negotiation between memory and the present, between intimacy and social context. Formal elegance does not conceal meaning — it condenses it.

Berlin offers a particular context for this exhibition. Its history of crossing boundaries, of divisions and attempts to rebuild unity, opens up new layers of interpretation. The work of Czwartos and Żądło does not seek national or generational representation in order to speak. It does not conform to simple cultural affiliations. Their paintings focus on the fate of the individual in the crowd and become records of experiences that resist easy definition. They do not recount the past but construct new forms of presence from it. Nothing here is accidental — each element carries its own weight and place. These are images that linger in the mind, not because they provide ready answers, but because they outline a new perspective and order.

In a world saturated with divisions and simplifications, the art of Czwartos and Żądło reminds us that a gaze can be the first gesture of reconciliation, a return to the original truth and sense of being. It does not enter into a debate between aesthetics and engagement, nor does it submit to political classifications or formal expectations. It emerges at the intersection of sensitivity and precision. It is beautiful, though not made to beautify. Present, though it makes no manifestos.

Their painting arrests with its intensity and calls for attentiveness. It reminds us that art not only can speak of a world without exclusion but actively shape it — through a willingness to be together, even if in different ways.

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The female figure in Sporn’s work is full of contradictions: gentle and aggressive, tender and fierce, mature and infantile, innocent and frivolous. It is from this internal inconsistency that she draws her strength. The stories told by the artist are not literal. She filters personal experiences through the language of painting, which oscillates between abstraction and figuration, corporeality and organicity, humanity and animality. The figures presented in the paintings seem to belong to the real and fantasy worlds at the same time. They are specific hybrids, often a combination of several generations and the differences that exist between them. Their gestures, facial expressions, the poses they adopt and the actions they perform are ambivalent. Full of internal tensions and an ambiguous emotionality emanating from their depths. Pastel colours, soft light and subtle, blurred contours contrast with the facial expressions and the piercing gaze of the figures.

The focus on a fragment, unnatural magnification and far-reaching close-up, as well as the compositional obliterations introduced by the artist, simultaneously create an atmosphere of intimacy and arouse a certain anxiety, or even a sense of danger. This poetics makes Sporn’s painting mysterious. Her works pose questions, encouraging us to discover what lies beneath the surface. In her diploma thesis she writes: “When I paint, I feel how intertwined my body and my emotions are. Each patch of colour is a trace of a feeling, a memory, an impulse. I want the viewer to be able to immerse themselves in this softness, take a breath and feel for a moment that strength can be delicate, and delicacy – full of life. This is a series about transformation, about finding oneself, about the courage to be oneself – even when the world expects something completely different from us”.

The series of paintings is complemented by fabrics made using the tufting technique. Sporn wants to render this medium, marginalized in high art, a tool for contemporary artistic expression. The objects presented in the exhibition were placed on kalkans made by the artist’s father – an armourer. The theme of transformation and interpenetration of generations is continued here. Objects once used in combat have been wrapped in soft, woven shields. This subtle contrast – also present in other works by the artist – refers to the motif of internal contradictions that exist in each of us.

CURATOR: Agata Wawrowska

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Kandracienka was forced into exile after 2020, when Lukashenko’s regime intensified its repression of academic and artistic communities. Shadko, who has lived and worked in Warsaw since 2023, creates paintings that bear witness to life in the shadow of political instability and existential uncertainty. Their art becomes a record of the search for self in a world that has become a new place of belonging.

For years, both artists have been engaged in constructing a collective portrait of 21st-century memory. Yet this is not a direct history—it is a reflection of the internal fractures caused by the loss of continuity: personal, cultural, linguistic. The figures in their paintings hover at the threshold between presence and disappearance, at once part of our reality and projections of our imagination. Kandracienka and Shadko do not reconstruct the world—they fracture it. Their painterly language, blending figuration with abstraction and deliberately disrupting internal visual logic, expands the boundaries of everyday perception. It is a world where the order of time and space is unsettled.

In Kandracienka’s works, childlike silhouettes appear in states of tension. These are suspended, often impersonal figures, as if poised on the edge of identity formation. Their neutrality does not signify emptiness—on the contrary, they become screens onto which fear, uncertainty, dreams, and questions about the possibility of being oneself under pressure are projected.

Shadko’s figures lose their individuality through masking, simplification, and universalization. His paintings do not portray specific people, but emotional states—a dialogue between the

individual and society, between intimacy and the compulsion to reveal oneself.

Though the starting point of their work is an experience of destabilization, it is not dominated by lament. Kandracienka and Shadko employ a complex visual language that does not merely speak of loss, but grapples with its consequences. Their paintings contain a tension between fragility and resilience, absence and the effort to re-anchor oneself. Color, form, and composition construct a framework capable of bearing the weight of questions about identity, memory, and the future. In this sense, their art holds an affirmative potential—not as an escapist vision, but as a conscious search for ways to persist in a world that no longer offers stable foundations. It is a meditation on what, today, might serve as a ground for individual presence.

CURATOR: MICHAŁ BOROWIK

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Fascinated by karstification, in which water shapes rocks for centuries, Marcin Kuberna explores how ceramics could react to the same processes. How could new textures, layers, patterns be created, which would be the result not only of the work of hands, but also of nature? It is a project of patience and transformation. He tries to look at ceramics not as a static object, but as a form that, like nature, constantly changes. It is the search for an answer to the question of how permanence can meet transience, how to create a piece that never ceases to transform.

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History is not a neutral record of the past, but a tool for shaping the present. Power does not have to impose itself by force – it is enough that it changes our habits until we forget how to ask questions. The truth does not suddenly disappear. It gradually dissipates, blurs in the chaos of opinions, becomes one of many voices that sound equally convincing.

Does the reality we see really exist, or is it just a reflection of our fears and desires? Plato wrote about shadows on the cave wall, about illusions that we mistake for truth because we can’t look at the source of light. Nietzsche heralded the end of great narratives that were supposed to order the world. Baudrillard warned that the copy could displace the original, and the simulation could become the only reality we know. The more information, the less sense there is. The greater the access to knowledge, the more difficult it is to distinguish facts from illusions. Not only does art document these processes, but it also reveals the mechanisms of manipulation and distortion of reality.

f the artificial seems more real than the real, if the digital image is ahead of reality, if the echo drowns out the voice, then where is the line between truth and illusion? The illusion lasts as long as we believe in it. The mirage disappears the moment we look at it consciously. Perhaps it is not about finding one final truth, but about not stopping asking. Maybe the most important thing is not to reach the destination, but not to lose yourself along the way.

The world is not given once and for all. It changes imperceptibly, to the rhythm of our habits and silent consent. Reality shapes what we see and what we don’t see. Can you recognize the moment when the mirage begins?

CURATOR: MICHAŁ BOROWIK

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One can say: age is like age, significant, but imaginable. Agreed. However, something else deserves to be emphasized in this story — Andrzej Gieraga constantly paints and is still innovative and searching. He is open to himself and to ideas that still haunt him and, as I understand it, chase him out of his home to his studio to be immortalized, revealed, and made. At the same time, I have the impression that he is curious of these ideas, not always sure about them, not always fully satisfied. Maybe that’s a good thing, because this bit of uncertainty or dissatisfaction makes you want to face the next topic, the next painting and the construction problem.

It should be emphasized that the works of this geometrist from Łódź are not only painted, but also constructed, and sometimes even sculpted. The painting substrate, designed and carefully made in a carpentry workshop, is the first indication of what we will be dealing with. In addition, there is the frequent relief of the surface of his painting constructions and compositions. This flirtation with three-dimensionality has been going on for years, almost from the beginning of Gieraga’s work, which may also be a consequence of his education and the fact that he started by creating fabrics – he was also a great perfectionist in this field.

It is also worth mentioning the colours. These have undergone numerous changes over the years. From the initial, decisive monochrome, i.e. the complete avoidance of colour and sticking to white and black, which lasted quite a long time, to the gradual introduction of colours. The colours that appeared at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s were somewhat shy, often a bit dirty. Indeed, there were greens, pinks and blues, but with a touch of other tones, which made them a bit subdued and harmonized well with the grays that dominated at that time. Strong, pure colours appeared in the early 2000s. Yellows, blues and pinks began to shine on the smooth or relief surfaces of his compositions.

However, around 2018, a new range appeared, which I called “chromats”. These are compositions with intense colours, but often whitened, i.e. pastels. Whitened greens, yellows, pinks and purples create a new, delicate colour aura, different from previous works. The painter seems to be liberated and free when it comes to his colourful games and explorations – a kind of “swarthy freedom”, as Marian Pankowski wrote in his poetic youth.

Finally, it is appropriate to congratulate the jubilarian on his freedom and lightness of colour, which he uses with such nonchalance and delicacy at the same time – a beautiful age for beautiful paintings.

CURATOR: Bogusław Deptuła

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Mężyk’s latest paintings introduce us to a deep, inner world full of contrasts and emotional shades. Where in the darkness of the crisis the light of renewal is born. Krzysztof treats his painting as a way of finding meaning and inner peace in chaos. It is a story about the process of recovery – not only physical, but also spiritual and emotional. His painting intertwines moments of introspection with an attempt to redefine himself. It is a testimony that every road through the crisis carries the potential for reconstruction, and art, which is an echo of this struggle, becomes a guide on the journey towards the inner balance.

Mężyk boldly explores boundaries – he sets and crosses them, combining the intensity of colours with subtle, almost everyday elements. He creates a space for meeting with him, leading us through emotional turns and moments of respite. With every brushstroke, he tries to convey to us the material trace of his own existence – full of living energy, despite the difficult experiences he has gone through. His paintings help us explore our own feelings, find strength in introspection and understanding our own limitations, as well as hope for regaining balance after difficult experiences.

The exhibition Rebirth: Art after the Breakthrough is a manifesto of human perseverance, reflecting art full of strength and sensitivity, which can find light even in the darkest moments. It is a reminder that every difficulty can be a turning point, the beginning of renewal and hope.

Curator: Michał Borowik

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The event, organized in collaboration with the Friends of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Warsaw Gallery Weekend on 28 September 2024, was accompanied by an exhibition of selected works by Kateryna Lysovenko, Tania Kandracienka, Veronika Hapchenko and Nikita Kadan, drawn from the Borowik Foundation Archive. During the meeting, an inscription created by Nikita Kadan appeared on the gallery’s main wall at the entrance: STAND WITH UKRAINE — a spontaneous gesture that became a memento of the encounter and has since been permanently integrated into the gallery space.

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Jute can seduce the most resistant ones to feeling with its characteristic smell and natural colour. It has thin but durable fibers that are a reminder of a hot and humid climate. Some time ago, I noticed its impressive scroll leaning against the wall of the Warsaw studio of a former student of painting at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts — Grzegorz Pieniak (born 1994). It demanded the final gesture of the artist. The rough texture can resist the strength of the painter’s fingers, and this allows him to achieve the perfect stretch of the canvas. Cutting jute does not require any special finesse, but the plasticity of the material gives full freedom of shaping, bending and the final gesture of impaling it on a wooden stretcher. The loose and translucent weave absorbs light inside the intricate structure and gives the promise of creating the work which Pieniak has been working on in his dreams for a long time. Dream and reality have a special meaning in his work, because it is within their limits that he sees disproportions related to identity, race, gender, sexuality, the world’s mental condition, tenderness or freedom, and he tries to give them new meanings.

Rubbing oil paint into a natural fabric with a brush requires a lot of attention, because its weaves can move pigments in divergent directions, which is related to the biological memory of absorbing liquids. As a result, Pieniak’s paintings create an optical illusion which, like a seed in an old photograph, gives a sense of the transience of the moment. A constant element of the paintings created in the series is piercing tenderness and fabric, which sets the boundaries of the shapes of human figures. Thick jacquard patterns, decorative folds of starched bedding, the softness of velour can draw attention away from bodies, their imperfections, desires for closeness and love, which manifests itself at the moment of our readiness to accept.

In Pieniak’s works, tenderness is hidden under the cover of night, among walls, bed frames, mirrors, fabrics, flowers, for fear of lack of acceptance and rejection. Regardless of where individual scenes take place, you can see somewhere deep, inside, another person, accompanied by a sense of being a stranger, lonely, but also the need for understanding and silence in the omnipresent chaos. Silence turns out to be the most individual experience, it is difficult to share. Pieniak is able to focus it in intimate portraits and proves that it is the human “aura” that evokes emotions and is the right starting point for noticing the truth.

Curator: Michał Borowik

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The serpent felt me with its forked tongue. It hissed in my ear a story that was at once beautiful and hopeful, but also sad and cautionary. Me and the heartless, mindless jellyfish have more in common than I could ever imagine. We too are mostly made of water. I drifted in waters for nine months. Warm, soundless waters that separated me from dry land. I fed on the breast milk. Many a time I licked tearful streams. Blood regularly flows from me, carried by the orbits of the moon. This bleeding is preceded by explosions of sexuality making my body moist.

Listening, I drew water from the well to quench my thirst. The water that slipped from my cupped hands reminded me of dinosaurs, filtered through tropical forests. Condensed as a cloud, it wandered between continents and sprinkled cultivated fields, recalling fish and birds bathing in it, as well as the bodies of Slavic rusalkas and ancient nymphs. What once seemed distant or inaccessible became close. The most banal and wondrous of substances is to flow with life. Some claim that we know the surface of Mars better than the depths of the oceans. Perhaps that’s why we use the term ‘nobody’s waters’. But they are ours, shared, trans-national and trans-body.

The exhibition Tales from the Bottom of the Well presents artists (Alicja Biała, Dobrawa Borkała, Justyna Górowska, Natalia Kopytko’s Revolution project and Agnieszka Szostek) who in, their practice, tell stories about water beings – rivers, oceans, ponds, animals and plants that inhabit them. They spin their narrations with tenderness and respect. They emphasise that balance is essential to our co-existence.

The exhibition takes place in the unique space of the Avenarius House, the headquarters of the Borowik Foundation, located in the heart of Warsaw’s Saska Kępa district. The location is linked to the proximity of the Vistula River and the history of this area, part of which belonged to the old Vistula riverbed and was uninhabited until the 17th century, treated as a living reservoir of resources necessary for the production of everyday objects or materials for the dikes that protected the city from being flooded by the river. This proximity broadens the interpretation of the works and provokes encounters with art embedded in both local and global contexts.

Artists: Alicja Biała, Art Project Revolution, Dobrawa Borkała, Justyna Górowska, Natalia Kopytko, Agnieszka Szostek

Curator: Katarzyna Piskorz

PRODUCTION: Art Project Revolution

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A decade has passed since the first collection exhibition at the BWA municipal gallery in Zamość. At the time, a crucial question I posed referred to roots, origins, ancestors as well as culture and traditions in relation to which I felt the need to position myself. I made attempts to interrogate an expansive concept of identity, including the role of a collector, pre-existing narratives, historical gaps and their equivocality. Blurred fates, lost heritage, smuggling, rituals, indeterminacy of oral history, attempts at monumentalisation: their totality situated in an eastern landscape of childhood, between Zamość and Kuźnica Białostocka. I tried to understand and provisionally order my thoughts through art. Nonetheless, working with memory has become ever more contentious and complex in the face of new reality and proliferating questions about the future.

A venue for the current show is the Avenarius family home, the history and preserved spatial organisation of which sets out the titular path of the Sun from its rise in the East to its down in the West. Who were the clients of the architect, Stanisław Barylski, in 1936 and the first owners of the house on Katowicka 7 street in Warsaw? In his article for the Życie Warszawy [Warsaw Life] newspaper, “Extreme Functionalism”, Jerzy Kasprzycki wrote: “The Avenarius family was renowned for its members being outstanding representatives of global science. It branched out into numerous countries from east to west. Here we have the eminent physicist, Mikhail Avenarius, professor at the university of Kiev. Here – Richard Avenarius, a German philosopher famous in his day.” After World War II, the house was the seat of the Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy [Capital City Reconstruction Office], later becoming the property of the architect Lech Niemojewski. Its immediate surroundings include a house designed by Bohdan Lachert and Józef Szanajca, where the painter Jacek Sempoliński had his studio until 2012.

Planning the exhibition, I travelled in a direction opposite to the movement of the Sun, as if to reverse its course. I headed towards the east which personifies my familial place, a place where all had begun. It is a journey leading down the path of learning, reaching all the sources and meaning of life. A temporal context of the emergence of this exhibition may encourage formulating interpretations related to a geo-political significance of the East and West. However, I would like to embed it in a decidedly deeper layer, eluding its topical resonance. I wish to tell a story woven with human thoughts, determining collective emotions, but in a manner that does not lose sight of a singular human being. Steel construction support poles, featured in the exhibition, symbolically refer back to my original conception—collection in construction—as well as alluding to incessant attempts at opposing the forces of gravity—to survive, art must have a shelter.

1. Looking Through to the End

An introduction to the exhibition is Mateusz Sadowski’s photo, Patrzenie do końca [Looking Through to the End], an encouragement to transcending the limits of perception, visual reaching out beyond the horizon of what we are shown. The truth is that modern technologies make us more up-to-date, all-seeing, but our field of vision, paradoxically, has been significantly narrowed and polarised. Beside it, I placed the Moon Jar no. 80 vessel by Marcin Kuberna, created with the traditional, manual technique of coiling clay, ready to be filled with content.

2. The Day After

Shortly, the sun will rise; a brand new day on the horizon. I imagine a spring morning of 1955, Krakow in revival, as Janina Kraupe makes the first visual notes of her dreams. Completely intuitively, automaton-like, she produces 18 linear, symbolic and numbered drawings, representing depictions of mysteries of primordial energy, primeval form and co-existence. A symbol-rich, 1984 series of paintings, Transmutations, forms an esoteric history of the process of metamorphosis of spirit into matter, the emergence of life with a clearly marked duality: above and below, luminous white and endless dark the artist suspended in a space replete with colourful and dynamic transformations. Her work provides relief, but also acquires a new meaning in the times of powerful tensions and fundamental changes. The paintings are accompanied by Gizela Mickiewicz’s sculpture, almost indistinguishable from a head and arms carved in a monolith. Each of its two elements can be freely rotated to frame the surrounding reality with their hollowed openings and establish new orders. The object is a reminder that reality is malleable, in constant change and one better not get used to it, since a single move, a change of lighting is enough for the process of free-associating to start anew.

3. The Centre of Events

Karolina Jabłońska enters into a direct game with us. The object of representation is a woman—her alter ego—who, staring intently in our direction, simultaneously assumes control over us. A multiplication of details and sensations prevents us from making ourselves comfortable. Moreover, she draws us into directly experiencing a given situation, of boiling and barbecuing. Her work opposes traditional images of women, created by men. The woman artist contests idealised, passive images, takes charge and is having a lot of agency in the process. Beside her, Dominika Kowynia’s painting, Córka [Daughter], deals with a history (herstory?) of a toxic relationship with her mother: a hand is desperately striving to influence the shape of the protagonist, to subdue her and connect to broken egg shells, symbolising the family nest. A gesture of crushing and simultaneous breaking with the past is a demonstrative opening of a new chapter. Lera Dubitskaya’s piece is reminiscent of a terrarium with its own, harmonious ecosystem, a direct view of which we are afforded. Even if laced with complex emotional states, it triggers mostly positive feelings, offers hope. Her fantastical world of relations between fauna and flora helps us assume a more reflective position in the structures of (dis)order of the day.

4. New Reality

It is twilight: the Earth is illuminated by sunlight diffused in the atmosphere. Ala Savasevic and Nikita Kadan create in order to direct the world’s attention to their countries, to preserve their repeatedly destroyed heritage. They want to turn it into an essential point of reference for the current discussions about the future of not only Belarus and Ukraine, but also Europe and the rest of the world. Kadan seeks the truth and reminds us that history is inextricably linked to memory and forgetting, as much from the perspective of an individual as entire communities. Narrowly framed monuments demonstrate a fragile equilibrium between life and survival. A monument to the Soviet soldier with the distinctive helmet, dismantled during decommunisation, and an extant partisan’s monument with a meaningful look to the future. A conceptual element connecting the two images are smaller ones, centrally ‘pasted’ by Nikita, so as to symbolise the potential of long-gone opportunities: portraits of Picasso and Khlebnikow, produced in 1922 by Boris Kosarev from Kharkiv. The dominant motif in this section of the exhibition is a head filled with human thoughts, determinant of collective emotions. Wanda Czełkowska’s 1968 drawing on show reminds us that the head remains the most important body part, governing us right from the start. Dissimilarly, the centre of Agata Słowak’s painting is occupied by a head torn between a polar bear cub and a little fox. Her body reflects the troubles of gender, identity and sexuality—stretched between an actual reality and the world of imposed meanings. A centrepiece of the exhibition is Tomasz Kręcicki’s painting of a mercury thermometer showing the desired body temperature of 36.6 degrees Celsius.

Curator: Michał Borowik

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