One of the venues most frequented by artists and critics in the Polish capital is a small Japanese restaurant located in a low concrete and glass pavilion on Adolfa Pawinskiego Street: Sato gotuje (literally: Sato cooks), run by an amusing Japanese gentleman who fell in love with a Polish young lady about fifteen years ago and took up the restaurant business to make a living, though he disdainfully refuses to prepare sushi. Perched in precarious balance on a stool at a table that resembles a school desk, the young art critic Joanna Romek explains that in particular historical circumstances, art moves from one place to another, crosses geopolitical borders, and finds refuge elsewhere: “Today Warsaw benefits from the fact that, thanks to its dizzying development and growing wealth, artists are converging here from everywhere. Many Ukrainian artists came here, even before the war broke out, but also Georgians and even Russians. Quite a few Israeli artists are arriving now, with Polish ancestors, who can take advantage of a law that gives them the right to citizenship. They thus obtain a European Community passport that gives them the possibility of moving, for example, to Germany, but then many discover that things are better here, that the art scene is much more vibrant.” Jan Pomorski, sitting beside her, adds: “Because of the economic crisis, but also due to the danger of further political involution, many Berlin galleries have moved to Warsaw, or have opened branches that allow them to intercept the most interesting productions in Poland and in the neighboring Baltic countries.”<\/p>\n
The contemporary art market in Warsaw seems to know no crisis. The prices of works are decidedly very high. A substantial number of people, not only wealthy ones, willingly invest in works even by very young artists. At the same time, many public institutions and private foundations primarily promote avant-garde art from the last century and contemporary art. The most important of these foundations, the one created in 2008 by billionaire Jerzy Starak, is housed in one of Warsaw’s finest recent buildings, at 6 Bobinska Street. The Spectra Art Space is an experimental space dedicated to contemporary art that follows the example of the best global practices for creating places to promote art in corporate spaces, to present “events and phenomena, tensions and relationships significant to the modern world.”<\/p>\n
The head of the Foundation is critic Ania Muszynska, who curated the remarkable exhibition “Gruppa” (from June 14 to October 26, 2025). Gruppa was one of the most charismatic and expressive artistic formations of the 1980s in Poland and generally throughout all of Central-Eastern Europe. Artists such as Ryszard Grzyb, Pawe\u0142 Kowalewski, Jaros\u0142aw Modzelewski, W\u0142odzimierz Pawlak, Marek Sobczyk, and Ryszard Wozniak, in the historical moment of political tension and social insecurity, “found a violent and emotional artistic language, saturated with color, irony, and the grotesque, and at the same time extended their activities to performative forms of expression such as manifesto readings, demonstrations, improvised happenings.”<\/p>\n
The Starak Family Foundation began, in 2019, to also organize exhibitions within the official program of the Venice Art Biennale. That year, with Force Field, at the “Officine 800” (Fondamenta San Biagio alla Giudecca), it premiered the projects of thirteen young Polish artists. In 2024, in the Procuratie Vecchie in St. Mark’s Square, again curated by Ania Muszynska, the exhibition “In the First Person” dedicated to one of the greatest Polish postwar painters, Andrzej Wr\u00f3blewski (1927-1957), was highly successful. Most of the paintings on display, as is always the case in their exhibitions, belong to the Starak family’s private collection, which will soon build its own museum in the outskirts of Warsaw.<\/p>\n
The city administration’s commitment to contemporary art is evident in the quantity and quality of exhibition venues, such as the Zacheta National Art Gallery, famous for its temporary exhibitions and collection (over 3,500 artistic productions by Polish authors such as Tadeusz Kantor, Edward Krasinski, or Erna Rosenstein) and the large Center for Contemporary Art in Ujazdowski Castle, inside \u0141azienki Park. To these has been added the Museum of Modern Art (Msn), founded in 2005 and until now housed in temporary locations, and for a year now located in a large rectilinear, completely white building, designed by the New York studio Thomas Phifer and Partners, in front of the Stalinist-era Palace of Culture, with a collection of over a thousand works, including large-scale pieces, by artists such as Cecilia Vicu\u00f1a, Thomas Hirschhorn, Wolfgang Tillmans, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alina Szapocznikow, and Monika Sosnowska.<\/p>\n
The private galleries, both Polish and foreign, are very numerous. Among these, Asymetria deserves mention, which for years has chosen not to have a permanent location and organizes its exhibitions each time in different buildings. Its owner and driving force, Rafal Lewandowski, is significantly preparing for the second half of February, in a space on Targowa Street beyond the Vistula, an exhibition dedicated to the theme of “refuge,” in harmony with a certain apocalyptic climate that has lately been felt in Poland and with the obsession that Polish artists have always had with “memory.” The exhibition entitled “Schronienie” (shelters), which will display works by Marek Sobczyk, Zbigniew Libera, the prematurely deceased photographer Tomek Byra, and Mariola Przyjemska, is built around a story set in 3019, when on the European continent, due to long wars and diseases, human beings have become extinct and in their place remain Replicants who, in order to continue living, must continuously acquire memories and recollections of the vanished human race. Thus they build in their centers of life, the so-called “Shelters,” in which to store traces of homo sapiens’ existence, which will then serve as an energy accumulator for the new race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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