Prinz Gholam is the collaborative name of two artists, Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam, who have been working together since 2001. Hailing from different cultural backgrounds — German (Prinz) and Lebanese (Gholam) — their art transcends national contexts. They draw inspiration from diverse cultures and eras, incorporating these elements freely into their work. Their creative practice encompasses performance pieces and choreographies staged in the presence of viewers or for the photographic or film camera, as well as large-scale drawings, stone sculptural objects, and distinctive masks, the latter influenced by the 2020 pandemic.

The exhibition of paintings from the collection of Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw prepared for the National Forum of Music in Wrocław includes works by artists using various languages ​​of abstraction, from the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century.

Memory is a multi–part, ephemeral puzzle that stores and organizes our memories and thoughts. Each piece creates our personal story by determining who we were, who we are and who we will become. What happens to a person when a piece of the puzzle is removed? Who do we become when we lose ourselves, when our knowledge about ourselves disappears forever? Who are we in a world that we no longer recognize and that no longer recognizes us.

In 2018 the CENTRALA reconstructed a ‘water bowl’ in front of the Zachęta building — a basin with water plants. The concrete planters that once appeared in the Warsaw space were used for water holes — they created a network of ponds to irrigate and aerate the city. This flower bed concept was designed together with staff from the University of Warsaw Botanic Gardens, and then replicated elsewhere in Warsaw and in Gdańsk and Kielce, making a large-scale comeback for urban water gardening.

Trophia is a visual essay on the origins of life on Earth. This collection of photographs, sculptures and installations takes us back to the Precambrian era, when photosynthesis first occurred in the oceans. The central theme of the piece is chlorophyll, its sensitivity to light and the visualisation of the energy that gave rise to the first living cell and ultimately to everything that surrounds us.

Natalia Romik’s exhibition is an artistic tribute to survival architecture, the hiding places built and used by Jews during the Holocaust. They used tree hollows, wardrobes, urban sewers, caves or empty graves to create temporary shelters.

The exhibition presents a wide selection of works by Henryk Lula — artist, teacher and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. Comprising over 100 objects, it is the most comprehensive presentation to date of the achievements of this outstanding artist, who has worked in the technique and medium of ceramics from the 1950s to the present day. The theme of matter, emphasised in the title, corresponds to the conceptual message of the presentation, as well as the artist’s theoretical reflection on its role in art. The exhibition also explores the question of the development of the modern ceramic tradition in Poland, eluding the criteria of applied art or design, which has been vibrant on the Polish art scene since the 1960s.

Małgorzata Pawlak and Mikołaj Kowalski are a duo in life and art, authors of exhibitions in which they have presented individual works in dialogue with each other. As they themselves say, they share similar interests, readings and sources of inspiration. The exhibition they prepared for the Zachęta Project Room was also created as a duo and entitled There’s Nothing Here.

The exhibition organised on the 100th anniversary of the artist’s birthday features four themes present in his oeuvre: landscape, body, abstraction, and icon. The landscapes, composed using flat, geometric forms and painted from various perspectives, bring to mind film shots. Secondly, the body is not an object of aesthetic contemplation, but becomes an almost geometric form, it is simplified, rhythmic, anonymous — the artist sought to depict a sanctified body, abstracted from earthly reality.

This exhibition seeks to become something of an essay that distinguishes metaphors for our current times present in the art of Adolf Ryszka (1935–1995), a forerunner of new figuration, a tendency developing in parallel to the new wave in film and literature. The spotlight is on Ryszka’s famous works as well as those hitherto unknown, and the show features a group of small-scale sculptures that resonate with notions of organicity and concepts such as the uncanny, permutations, variability, imaginism. The sculptor built his own unique iconosphere by interpreting atrophy processes, combining the expression of the tragic and the vital, through opaque dialogues with visions of prostrate victims of wars in Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Kimba Frances Kerner was born in the United States, but she lives and works in Warsaw. In 2017, she began her Ph.D. studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she discovered artistic printmaking, which she has been exploring ever since. She specialises in the innovative combination of ceramics and graphics (she is developing a research and artistic project dedicated to graphic transfers on ceramics).

The artist Stasys Eidrigevičius is a storyteller. Curious, always reactive and responsive, mischievous at times, sad at others, transforming reality into a visual metaphor. Behind every image drawn by his hand there lies a story – known and believed, and sometimes utterly unpredictable or unrecognisable, which only makes it all more interesting. Stasys’s line, succumbing to the freedom of the pencil, is a reaction: to a mood, to an emotion, to people, to the environment, to the everyday, to the moment that makes one pause.

The series of paintings by Wiktor Dyndo, entitled The Date, is a new version of his painterly statement on the beauty of the tragedy of contemporary times. The beauty of the inevitability of the course of events bringing suffering and death, the spectacle of the events to which the artist devotes his attention, lies in the fact that all this evil is happening before our eyes: we see it on the screens of our smartphones, computers and TV sets. We know about it. These are portraits of tragic events marking the rhythm of our times; the dates like horizontal cuts hurt our eyes, obscuring the painted landscape.

The starting point of the project Looking for Jesus. Library was a fascination with the cultural-religious phenomenon known as ‘Jerusalem syndrome’. The artist has always been interested in the question of identity and the role others play in constructing or erasing it. In the case of people marked by this syndrome, Kozyra encountered a problem expressed in the question posed by her characters: is there a strong blocking mechanism of denial standing in the way of finding our own identity, introduced into our experience by the ego? And by the Others representing it, with their dictates of single-channel narratives, of which the Man of Nazareth is a contradiction?

The Tadeusz Kulisiewicz monographic exhibition presents a unique selection of the artist’s works — drawings and prints — never before shown in one common space. The exhibition will feature works from galleries and museums such as the National Museum in Warsaw, the Asia-Pacific Museum and Zachęta — National Gallery of Art, but also from the Museum of the Polish Army and the Museum of Warsaw. A significant part of the exhibition will be works from the private collections of Leonard and Wanda Pietraszak, Jacek Kudelski, as well as Jacek Łozowski. An extensive selection of drawings, prints and sketches created throughout the artist’s life will be on display. There will also be works from the artist’s numerous travels to China, India, South America and Cuba.

Presented at the Zachęta Gallery, it is the first so far, such a comprehensive presentation of Mariola Przyjemska's works.

Susan Mogul’s solo exhibition at Zachęta — National Gallery of Art will include video productions from the 1970s as well as her most recent films, objects and works on paper. They touch on important issues such as the position of women, social changes in customs, family ties and the artist’s relationship with her mother.

GAMES AND TOYS is an exhibition presenting games that entertain, teach and connect generations, as well as toys and objects created for recreation by young Polish designers. These projects can be used by both children and adults. They are from the analogue and virtual worlds. Many are educational, supporting intellectual development and the acquisition of new skills, while others are more sporting in nature. They all allow you to spend your leisure time usefully, develop your creativity in interaction with other people and sometimes even break down barriers. 

curator: Magda Kardasz  

The exhibition is not only an extensive showcase of young Polish art, but above all a story about anxieties, emotions and the potential they hold for change. Although its form refers to a traditionally understood survey of current art, it does not concentrate on mapping phenomena, tendencies and most significant approaches; nor does it point at the key actors on the art scene. It highlights generational sensibility and various ways of reacting to tensions and changes. Last but not least, it seeks what is common instead of showcasing individualities or original approaches.

Rhizopolis is a city of roots created underground beneath the forest by refugees from the Earth’s surface. The idea of Joanna Rajkowska, it is a set design for an imagined futuristic film that introduces us to a hypothetical future world of humankind, after the anticipated great catastrophe that will end the current Anthropocene epoch. The scenario outlined by the artist is a vision of radical dependence, in which hitherto-dominated nature turns rescuer in all its unshakable duration, providing the necessities to support human life. In the exhibition, we enter the area of both artistic installation and scenography for a film in which we play ourselves, and in which we can act our own scripts.

-Happy Family is a family project. The impetus to create it was the situation the artist’s older brother Filip found himself repeatedly. Although nothing was lacking in family home, he was periodically homeless. The problem of homelessness is so complex that it is often difficult to pinpoint its causes.

Roman Stańczak’s sculpture is a real aircraft, turned inside out, so that its interior — elements of the cockpit, on-board equipment and passenger seats — becomes visible on the outside, while the wings and fuselage are inside. The artist applied the same strategy of turning things inside out in his works from the Misquic series (in the first half of the 1990s) to everyday objects: a kettle, a bathtub or a wall unit. These works were interpreted in the context of the brutal economic transformation in Poland. Three decades later, the inside-out private luxury aircraft becomes a symbol of global economic inequalities.

Jerzy Krawczyk’s exhibition at Zachęta — National Gallery of Art presents a multi-layered oeuvre based on the painter’s experiences and personal convictions, as well references to the canon of ancient art and art from the early 20th century. The exhibition features the artist’s mature works, including landscapes of Łódź painted from the second half of the 1950s, still lifes and portraits developing the concept of spatial realism.

Natalia Romik’s exhibition is an artistic tribute to survival architecture, the hiding places built and used by Jews during the Holocaust. They used tree hollows, wardrobes, urban sewers, caves or empty graves to create temporary shelters.

Mariusz Wilczyński’s exhibition centres around one film – the full-length debut of this well-known animator titled Kill It and Leave This Town. The film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in early 2020, but due to the coronavirus pandemic it had to wait almost a year before it arrived in cinemas. During this time it was shown and won awards at the world’s leading animation festivals -– in Annecy and Ottawa, among others.

In her project, Marta Krześlak reflects on the universality of meanings, pondering time and space. She creates a laboratory of moving objects in which she observes how they interact with each other and their surroundings, as well as how they relate to familiar phenomena while remaining abstract objects.

The artist explores the fringes of photography, using it as a record of her performative practice, and experiments with methods of its reproduction and processing. She introduces into art visual elements taken from mass culture and its techniques. The exhibition is built around the most important series: About Her and The Essence of Things.

The exhibition presents, for the first time in Poland, avant-garde Japanese art from two historical decades, a time of ground-breaking events and transformations that resulted in the emergence of the Japan we know today. It features works by the most important artists of the time, rarely shown outside Japan, and documentation of the avant-garde movements of the time.

The Views competition, which for nearly two decades has presented the most significant phenomena in Polish art at a given time, this year be held not only for the last time, but also in a changed formula. It seems that due to the selection of this year’s finalists, it is an exceptional edition — not only in artistic terms.

The exhibition of works by Hege Lønne, a Norwegian artist with ties to Poland, presents sculptures, installations, video works and documentation of artistic activities from various periods of her career. The exhibition is complemented by unpublished photographs of Warsaw — colour slides from the period of transformation of the 1980s and 1990s — and animated films.

The exhibition presents both works by the artist’s father and their collaborative works — small objects, sculptures and drawings, as well as three films by Bartosz. The exhibition is accompanied by a mini-guide, in which the artist fills in certain themes. It takes the form of fantastic and bizarre storytelling, in which recollections and stories about their hometown are mixed with literary fiction.

The exhibition I Feel Something. Don’t Know What is a project created by the Art Encounters Foundation in Timişoara in collaboration with the Zachęta Project Room in Warsaw. Its aim is to generate a creative bridge between the artists who are active on the Timișoara art scene and the Polish artists who have participated in the exhibitions organised by our partner institution over the past few years.

The latest show in the Living Storages series came about as the result of a search of the Zachęta collection for works depicting reactions to the experience of social pressure. The selection of works shows the difficulties posed by a system in which the model of the ‘statistical human’ is in force, also calling attention to the problem of biopower, the mechanisms of power over the body, people, or oneself.

The curators of the exhibition undertake a critical reflection on the changes taking place at that time, illustrating their scale and dynamics using visual material from the fields of painting, photography, film, design and architecture. It includes over 400 works from six countries of the former Eastern Bloc: Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary.

Bartosz Mucha is a designer working on the borderline between design, architecture and visual arts, utilitarianism and conceptualism, known for his existential questions, poeticism and humour, as well as for setting a rhythm and time frame for his activities.

The presentation Living Storages: Didactics was created as a result of a discussion about the items in the Zachęta’s collection that were the most interesting to us — the guides and educators working with people of different ages, backgrounds, and needs.

The exhibition I Feel Something. Don’t Know What is a project created in collaboration Art Encounters Foundation in Timişoara with the Zachęta Project Room in Warsaw, its aim being to generate a creative bridge between the artists who are active on the Timișoara art scene and the Polish artists who have participated in the exhibitions organised by The Zachęta Project Room over the past few years.

There is a large group of works identified as self-portraits in Zachęta’s collection, as well as works directing our attention to such a meaning. The former is evidenced by the titles and the similarity of the images to their authors. The self-portrait nature of the latter group is indicated by factors related to issues of identity, interests and artistic practices of the artists, reflected in their paintings, sculptures or works on paper.

The exhibition Sculpture in Search of a Place is yet another one in a series of cross-sectional thematic exhibitions at the Zachęta, devoted each year to a different artistic medium. It tackles the subject of the identity of Polish sculpture over the last sixty years — not so much as a chronology of artistic activity, but as a presentation of the phenomena and creative attitudes that have been essential for its development.

In the summer of this special year, Maciek Salamon said, ‘When the pandemic came, it turned out that out of the things I’d been doing so far, I couldn’t (or didn’t have to) do anything. And so, after many years, I remembered that I like painting.’

The project takes us into the world of a hypothetical future for humanity on planet Earth after the expected great catastrophe ending the current human era. In the Anthropocene, we have realised that the world has changed irreversibly, and its survival, including that of the human species, is called into question.

Zachęta — National Gallery of Art owes both its seat and the mission of popularizing visual arts to the Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts (SEFA) established 160 years ago by art enthusiasts and artists. This dedication to art resounds in the inscription “Artibus” (To the Arts) on the building’s façade. From the very beginning, this mission has included collecting contemporary art – then and today.

Joanna Piotrowska’s first comprehensive monographic exhibition in Poland presents a selection of her works from the past few years. In her staged photos and videos, the artist focuses on exploring human relationships and their bodily expression.

Places on the outskirts of the city, abandoned and forgotten, are governed by their own laws. The objects accumulated there pile up in layers, their destiny changes or disappears completely as a result of transformations; time flows differently.

Prepared specially for the Zachęta, Monika Sosnowska’s exhibition is the first such large monographic presentation organized in Poland. It features the artist’s older works selected from her comprehensive output as well as more recent works focusing around new themes and inspirations.

In her conceptual project Being Paul Cézanne!, painter Paulina Pankiewicz refers to an iconic work of art — the views of Montagne Sainte-Victoire painted by Cézanne.

Ahmed Cherkaoui is widely recognized as a pioneer and one of the most prominent representatives of Moroccan contemporary art. At the beginning of 1960s he spent a year in Warsaw, studying at the Fine Arts Academy, and his stay in Poland turned out to be a breakthrough in his painting career. Focused on the exploration of matter painting, the Warsaw period heralded the artist’s later experiments in abstract art, replete with references to traditional Berber culture and religious motifs of Islam, as well as to Polish and French avant-garde.

The Flying Lesson is an exhibition by Andrzej Krauze, an outstanding Polish cartoonist and illustrator who has lived and worked in London for almost forty years. In Poland, Krauze is mainly known for his satirical works. Older readers may remember his drawings published in Kultura monthlly in the 1970s.

The exhibition "Videotapes. Early Video Art (1965–1976)" situates video in a time when it was not yet in the mainstream of artistic circulation and functioned primarily as an experiment that remained outside the area of interest of art institutions, market and distribution. It presents single-channel works made on magnetic tapes. They can be characterised as intimate, spontaneous recordings, mostly made by the artists themselves.

How do artists perceive the world and how do their children see it? What makes them happy? What do they fear? How do they see the future together? Winter break at the Zachęta will open with the first joint exhibition of artists and their children prepared for other children and their parents.

Anna Siekierska, an environmental activist and graduate of the Faculty of Sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (diploma in 2013), has prepared an exhibition for the interiors of the Zachęta Project Room. The artist primarily creates works that critically examine the human approach to nature. Architecture is also an important source of inspiration for her. This time the author’s starting point were reflections on the problem of urban wastelands.

The exhibition presents the latest paintings by Radek Szlaga, which were created as a result of his study of the language of the painting medium, underestimated narratives and relations between art, information and knowledge. Today, these interests gain new meaning and context.

Change the Setting. Polish Theatrical and Social Set Design of the 20th and 21st Centuries is the fourth review exhibition devoted to theatrical set design in the history of Zachęta. Its concept was born out of the original vision of Robert Rumas, a respected visual artist and set designer. The curator and his team of collaborators lead the viewers through 100 years of history, building the narrative of the exhibition according to an issue and theme-based layout and creating contextual references to earlier and later phenomena.

The exhibition project was inspired by the historical exhibition of the works of the German graphic artist, sculptor and painter Käthe Kollwitz, which took place in the Zachęta Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions (CBWA) in 1951. The development of documentation and analysis of the exhibition reception was possible thanks to a research project conducted in recent years at the Zachęta gallery, in which exhibitions, rather than individual works, were the subject of research.

Lado Lomitashvili’s project, prepared for the Zachęta Project Room, refers in a metaphorical way to the memory of events and stories recorded in water and objects. Items taken out of their usual context, marked by practical use, and transferred into the gallery space, spin their stories. Lomitashvili’s artistic practice is inherently multidisciplinary. His education in the field of architecture makes him particularly sensitive to the nuances of the spaces in which he builds his abstract architectural/sculptural/painting installations with philosophical, social and ecological resonance.

The exhibition consists of seven films by outstanding and renowned artists; some of them are presented for the first time. They show in different ways the condition of people, the Earth, what we are losing and what we desire, the effects of the different forms of alienation that we experience globally today. They make us aware of the causes of alienation, the mechanisms of destructive human behaviour, recalling historical and contemporary events that affect the state of today’s world.

"Simple Rainbow" was created in 1991 for the exhibition entitled "Epitaph and Seven Spaces", curated by Janusz Bogucki and Nina Smolarz. The rainbow stood on Małachowskiego Square until 1993. After 28 years, it will reappear on the square, as a conversation starter on today’s society and world.

An experimenter in the field of cinematographic techniques and a film education pioneer, originator and founder of the Film Drawing Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1957–1972) — the first such institution in the world offering education in animation at a higher artistic school.

Paulina Włostowska had the opportunity to become acquainted with the works of her late neighbour, the local artist Czesław Gendek — a painter who created works in various techniques and who was involved with applied graphics, exhibitions and advertising. The Gendek family studio housed both the unfinished works of the artist and the tools of his everyday craft. Włostowska never met the painter personally, so she only came across an orphaned space and objects that had lost their meaning and function.

Views is the most important competition in Poland addressed to artists who are young, but already present on the Polish art scene. Organised continuously on a biannual basis since 2003, it showcases the most interesting phenomena on the art scene. 

Flight, a sculpture by Roman Stańczak, will be presented at the Polish Pavilion during the 58th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia. Visitors will experience the unique form and scale of the sculpture — an inside-out aircraft — but also the effect of an unexpected “reversal of the world”. The project delivers a commentary on the situation of political and economic transformations.

The exhibition is part of the French artist Gaëlle Choisne’s Temple of Love project, inspired by the Roland Barthes’ The Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. It is a heterogeneous mix of existing sculptures from the exhibition shown in w Bétonsalon — Centre d’art et de recherche in Paris and a new production for the Zachęta Project Room, including a new experimental video inspired by the artist’s recent visit in Haiti, from where her family derive from.

Millions of spreads, 16 language versions, several hundred authors of photographs, three basic editions, two of which were published almost continuously from 1954 to 1989 (version for the West) and 1990 (version for the East) — that is the impressive picture of the Poland monthly in numbers.

Innocent and ominous, suspended between the animate and the inanimate, mobile and immobile, human and inhuman, the theatrical puppet continues to fascinate...

The exhibition prepared by the Center of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko and Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, based on the collections of both institutions, presents works by outstanding, canonical artists and significant artists of the young and middle generation, active within various tendencies and artistic trends. The show is a representative collection of Polish art of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of our century.

The multi-level project deals with issues related to bodily movement and physical presence. Wandering is a state that allows one to disappear momentarily, to blend in with the surroundings, On the other hand, it is conducting to observe certain phenomena, which remain invisible in other conditions. The exhibition, playing with the ways of exhibiting works, is a multi-layered game with the body and senses of the viewer, at the same time becoming fully understandable only after passing through the whole distance in the landscape of the Zachęta Project Room. In this case, the journey begins with an attempt at a meeting of artists, continues in a commentary on their common impressions of functioning in the world of art, drawing on such notions as the visibility coefficient, and closes with reflections on the overlooked aspects of the artistic work.

The exhibition of works by Liliana Porter at Zachęta is the first presentation of the work of this outstanding artist of such scope in Poland. She was born in 1941 in Argentina, studied art in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and then in New York, where she has been living and working since 1964, while remaining present on the Argentine art scene. 

In Kurdish the word "hiwa" means hope. The exhibition "Highly Unlikely but not Impossible" showcases the works of Hiwa K - an Iraqi Kurd who found political asylum in Europe around 20 years ago, and today is considered one of the leading contemporary artists in the world.

"Rechowicz/Smaga. Circle" is an exhibition of over one hundred photographic objects created together by Hanna Rechowicz and Jan Smaga that evoke the history of a house at Lekarska Street in Warsaw where she has lived for many years. A work in process, the house was shaped from the 1950s by the artist couple of Gabriel and Hanna Rechowicz; following Gabriel’s death, Hanna has been taking care of and working on it herself. It is a place with a rich past — for decades a meeting point for Warsaw’s art community: architects, fine artists, filmmakers.

The exhibition at the Zachęta Project Room will show paintings — a cycle of works on canvas and activities carried out directly on the wall. I would like my paintings hanging on the walls to blend in with the gallery space. I also intend to check to what extent this space can be disturbed by transferring painting from canvas directly to the walls.

"Maps under the sky of Rio de Janeiro" is a presentation of the artistic output of Anna Bella Geiger (b. 1933), a pioneer of Brazilian art. In the historical context of modern art in Brazil, Geiger, alongside Hélio Oticica, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape, is one of Rio de Janeiro’s top artists who have re-established the connection between the expressionist tradition with neo-concretism (neoconcretismo). The exhibition reflects the diversity of the artist’s interests: from anthropology to astronomy, from indigenous cultures and alchemy to concrete poetry and Brazilian music, from modern utopias and dystopias to game theory. Geiger’s works from the 1970s – drawings, prints, and video projections – serve as the exhibition’s starting point and form its core.

Rebellion of the Deaf is a performance and film by one of the most interesting visual artists of the middle generation, an associate professor at the Chair of Intermedia of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. The eponymous Rebellion of the Deaf refers to the protest of deaf students from the American Gallaudet University, who in 1988 fought for the appointment of the first deaf rector in history. The project was inspired by the story of a Dutch artist, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, born in Europe. When she was born, social services advised her parents to raise her without using their own language, in order to better assimilate her. The parents, who did not know Dutch, brought up their daughter practically without speaking to her: they used only about 50 of the simplest words at home.

Graphics are the most numerous and at the same time the least known works in the Zachęta collection. The individual objects included in the exhibitions have never allowed the broader audiences to look at the whole of the collection in a broader way. Therefore, we wanted to recall a genre that occupied such an important place on the artistic scene a few decades ago, and over the last 30 years has been gradually marginalised. The 2,100 works in our collection are a very diverse set in terms of style, quality and form; with particularly outstanding works from the 1960s. We noticed their consistency, high artistic level, as well as combination of traditional techniques with the search for new formal solutions, so characteristic of graphic arts.

Larisa Crunțeanu’s project is connected with an accidental finding in the centre of Bucharest. Together with the artist Sonia Hornung, they encountered an object that was difficult to identify — a silent, stone-shaped loudspeaker standing on a lawn. The paradoxical finding provokes many questions, not only about what the object is and what it is for, but also about what it sounds like and what its voice says. Is it one of the voices of a larger group? Where is the boundary between its reality and being artificial?