One of the headline events is at the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, which will show original works by Warhol as part of an exhibition on the art of Lemkos and Carpathian Ruthenians, a minority community from the Carpathian region with roots in today’s southeastern Poland and neighboring areas.
The show, titled “Forms of Presence,” opens in January and is billed as the first presentation of this scale devoted to the community’s artistic output. The museum says the exhibition “demonstrates that the art of Lemkos and Carpathian Ruthenians is not a folkloristic curiosity, but a living, autonomous, and multidimensional part of culture,” capable of engaging both Carpathian spiritual heritage and contemporary aesthetics.
Alongside Warhol, the exhibition includes works by artists such as the celebrated naiive folk painter Nikifor (Epifaniusz Drowniak,) and icon master Jerzy Nowosielski.
In Warsaw, the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art is planning two March exhibitions tied to Russia’s war on Ukraine. The group show “This Cat Was Drawn During the War” brings together artists including Yulia Kryvich, Ksenia Hnylytska, Darek Foks, and Zbigniew Libera, and asks how art functions during wartime and how images of conflict remain in memory, from World War II through the wars after the breakup of Yugoslavia to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A second exhibition, “What Do We Mean When We Talk About Crimea,” focuses on works by artists from different generations intended to help audiences understand the forces shaping today’s debates about Crimea.
A major anniversary in Kraków will bring renewed attention to sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, one of Poland’s most influential postwar artists, known for work centered on the body and shaped by her experience of war and the Holocaust.
The National Museum in Kraków will present “Szapocznikow. Personal” in March to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth, promising an intimate display designed to create a sense of physical closeness to the work.
The museum frames her art as focused on the body as a carrier of dramatic history and sensual experience. It also notes her engagement with socialist realist aesthetics early in her career, including the sculpture “Friendship,” once displayed at Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science, with a remaining fragment now held next-door at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Warsaw’s Zachęta, the National Gallery of Art, will return to Szapocznikow in October in a paired exhibition with Iranian German sculptor Nairy Baghramian, titled “Nairy Baghramian/Alina Szapocznikow.”
The gallery describes shared themes of corporeality, sensuality, illness, and mortality. The show will be Baghramian’s first major presentation in Poland, after her sculptures were displayed on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2023.
Zachęta’s program also includes an international exhibition in May on the pressures facing teenagers today. “Growing Up” will feature artists including Jaśmina Wójcik, Mohamed Bourouissa, and Anhar Salem, with a focus on issues such as body image, sexuality, loneliness, social exclusion, and cyberbullying. The gallery says teenagers will take part as co-creators of the project.
In Wrocław, the National Museum will open “Sunrise in the West” in March, focusing on three Japanese artists who moved their practice to Europe: Koji Kamoji, Yoshio Nakajima, and Keiji Uematsu. The exhibition brings together painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, and performance documentation, and highlights approaches rooted in nature, philosophy, conceptual art, and site-specific work, meaning art created for a particular place.
Warsaw’s Poster Museum is scheduled to reopen in March with a permanent exhibition titled “The Polish Poster: The Collection.” The museum says the display will rotate every three months and, over time, show a total of 36,000 objects, from the turn-of-the-20th-century Young Poland period and interwar advertising through postwar propaganda, the Polish School of Posters, and contemporary graphic design. The exhibition is designed to present a continuous narrative of social, cultural, and political change as reflected in poster art.
Kraków’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAK,) will mark the 80th birthday of conceptual artist Ewa Partum with a March exhibition, “Ewa Partum: Contemplating Art, Contemplating Love,” also timed to her 60th year of artistic work.
The museum says the show will place her work in new contexts, alongside artists from her early period and later generations shaped by her feminist strategies. It will focus on the body, touch, and voice as both physical and political media, as well as social engagement and critique of patriarchal structures.
In Toruń, the Centre of Contemporary Art “Znaki Czasu” will open a February retrospective devoted to Stefan Knapp, a Polish émigré artist who worked in the United Kingdom and developed a technique of applying enamel to steel. The museum plans to show 110 works, including enamel pieces, sculptures, paintings, drawings, lamps, and tapestries, describing it as Knapp’s largest exhibition in Poland.
Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art will stage two monographic exhibitions in March, devoted to Julie Mehretu, an influential American painter known for large-scale, layered abstract works linked to social and political change, and Maria Jarema, a key figure in Polish modernism.
The museum positions the two shows as a dialogue, arguing that both artists treat abstraction as a way of engaging with reality across different generations and contexts.
Later in the year, in June, the same museum will present “You Are in the Heart of Change: Surrealism and Anti-Fascism,” a major exhibition previously shown at the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
The show brings together works by major artists including Picasso, Dora Maar, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington, and presents surrealism as an international political network.
The museum says audiences will be able to trace “international solidarity” linking places from Prague to Mexico City, Cairo to Republican Spain, and Marseille to Martinique, presenting surrealism as a movement its participants understood as political and international.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP