Warsaw Gallery Weekend

Twelve years ago, a banner reading “Today’s Art Makes Tomorrow’s Poland” hung in the center of Warsaw, its stately red typeface reminiscent of Communist-era slogans. Cezary Bodzianowski’s The Prophecy (2012) was suspended just beneath the geometric, zigzagging rooftop of the former “Emilia” department store—then temporary home to Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art.1 Now the rooftop, a pearl of Polish modernism, is in ruins, and the plot where the store once stood is surrounded by high-rises that compete with the socialist realist architecture of the Palace of Culture and Science.2 The sense is of a city rushing towards the future, as though escaping its past and in denial of the present: the ongoing war in neighboring Ukraine, Russian drones breaching Polish airspace, rising xenophobia, and a newly elected president— another right-wing hardliner.

2025 marks the 15th edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend (WGW), a milestone from which to look back.3 At WGW’s inception, contemporary art in Poland was in a very different place, with a reputation for being hermetic and opaque, open only to a narrow group of insiders fluent in its references, theory, and social capital. And yet, contemporary art—thanks in no small part to WGW—has consistently brought a crowd of international visitors to the city, who cluster at galleries each autumn with red itineraries in hand, as if fulfilling Bodzianowski’s rooftop prophecy.

This year’s edition comprises twenty-four shows in its central program, plus an equal number of visiting spaces from other Polish cities under the newly introduced “WGW+” moniker, as well as private and public venues. Prominent this year were recognized artists whose contributions represented gentle evolutions within their established repertoires. This isn’t to suggest that there was nothing unexpected, as Roman Stańczak’s show at Stereo proved. M.C. (2025) is a lone piano subjected to Stańczak’s trademark procedure of turning objects inside out. Sourced from a nearby music school, the instrument has been reduced to a raw, wooden core marked by the tools of its deconstruction. The piece is a startling sight: curls of shavings tucked back inside the piano, like remains carefully returned to a corpse after an autopsy; flecks of black lacquer still visible on the body; the company name like letters on a worn gravestone. But the most poignant detail is that the instrument still makes a sound.

Despite Warsaw’s increasingly cosmopolitan population and the growing presence of international (especially Belarusian and Ukrainian) cultural workers contributing to the artistic landscape of the city, the majority of exhibiting artists were Polish. One notable exception was MONOPOL’s presentation of Colette Lumiere’s work. An iconic presence in the 1970s New York avant-garde, the artist’s oeuvre spans performance, installation, staged photography, and street actions. Documentation of Ancora tu (1977), in which the artist inhabited a silk-lined lair; a collection of vinyl covers (Records from the Story of my Life, 1978–ongoing) portraying some of her personae; and a tombstone-shaped tableau like an intricate, hyper-Baroque, postmodern relief (A Tomb for Orpheus, 1986) all testified to a boundless imaginative realm in which Lumiere sets the rules.

Politics were largely absent from the main section of WGW: instead of meeting reality directly, several shows pursued a world-building impulse, hinting at fiction’s power to remake the real and welcoming audiences to domains more just and nuanced than the world beyond. Alongside Julia Woronowicz (WHOISPOLA) and Mia Dudek (IMPORT EXPORT), a standout was Ant Łakomsk’s show at Turnus, itself a self-contained world: a gallery-café and social hub known for quizzes, crossword soirees, and film/literature clubs, tucked behind an inconspicuous row of service pavilions.

Łakomsk, among the most compelling painters of the younger Polish generation, has a gift for moving fluently within—and claiming—art-historical vocabularies. In “Camille” she channels Marc Camille Chaimowicz, incorporating elements of design and stagecraft into her practice. Framed by Zuzanna Kozłowska’s scenography and Franciszek Smoręda’s exhibition commentary, Łakomsk’s works are full of allusion and innuendo. Black, coffin-like frames lend the works the air of portable altarpieces; faceless women, absorbed in everyday tasks, appear across the canvases. In Leisure (2025), a figure dressed like a governess reads a book. Perhaps the same volume, seen from the girl’s perspective, is depicted in the small diptych (Pair of Blanks, 2025) near the gallery entrance. “Camille” is laced with such enigmatic moments; discovering them is a delight, drawing one further into a painterly world that allows one, if only briefly, to forget the reality outside. Hopefully, this is not the last year one is allowed to do so.