In Poland, as everywhere else, the social and political climate has a big impact on its artistic community and on the artists’ practices; perhaps there even more so, since it’s one of the countries of the former Soviet Bloc, still a curiosité with unpredictable political behaviour, partly justified by a conservative nostalgia of the oppressive but ‘securing’ social structures.

What seems to be more important nowadays in Poland is the forging of a solid national identity, trying to conserve the history and tradition, researching the past, bringing it to light and announcing moments of glory and pride for a country that was for a long time defined only as a satellite state of the Soviet Bloc. And this is also obvious in the art presented by the state funded institutions and museums of contemporary art. What prevails is art from the ‘dark days’ of the Communist era that is now being exposed and not necessarily judged, but considered of having a museal value.

Being an artist myself, for the two months I spent in Warsaw it was interesting to see how other artists work and operate, how they form connections, links and relationships within the art community. Today, the notion that the artist is a contributing member of the society, a social and political factor, still lingers from the Socialist past. Having as an entry point this ethical stance of the artist being an active member of the society and the contemplation of Art as participation, a way to examine artistic practices in Poland would be on the dialectic of the ‘Process’ as opposed to the finished artwork, the ‘Art Object’, in postmodern terms.

So the focus point would be the process of creating work, an ongoing activity of research, absorbing information and testing ideas, and the workshop as a space of experimenting, formulating and applying concepts. What I think would give a good overview of what art in Poland would be, from that angle, is the example of five artists with an important role and influence in the art scene: Edward Krasinski, Zbigniew Libera, Karol Radziszewski, Grzegorz Kowalski and Michal Budny.

An illustration for the example of the workshop as the place of artistic process, a place where ideas and influences are tested and performed could be the workshop-studio of Edward Krasinski, which is open to the public. An apartment at the top floor of a social housing block was used as a living-in studio for Henryk Stazewski (1894–1988), a constructivist abstract painter and theoretician, and by Edward Krasinski (1925–2004), a minimalist, conceptual artist, who at some point were sharing it. The whole studio now is essentially Krasinski’s work at display, installations, photographs, and the first test of the blue Scotch tape installation — that would become his trademark — is expanding around the walls of the flat. The studio was one of the artists’ meeting points during Stazewski’s time there with Krasinski orchestrating a constant transformation of the studio, as if creating a playhouse of found objects, drawings and sculptures. Influenced by Stazewski and their co-existence in sharing this studio, Krasinski exhibited as an hommage, real size photographs he had taken of the studio, presenting in that way the works of both artists. The idea of the studio as a changing platform for testing and presenting ideas along with the initiative to open an artist studio to the public derives from the Theory of Place, which, in 1966, was an attempt to investigate the division between two isolated domains of artistic activity: the studio, where the work is created, and the exhibition space, where it is displayed. [i]

An example on the concept of process is the work and activity of Zbigniew Libera (b. 1959), an artist known for his grotesque and humorous angle on the burden subjects of Polish history (Auschwitz, Ghetto Uprising, Polish nationalism), especially with his Lego Concentration Camp, 1996. He was recently leading student workshops based on a progression of the theory of spatial interactions, the Open Form (a term introduced by utopian architect Oskar Hansen [ii]) subverting and mediating situations of communication and focusing on the process of creation. With his belief that the artist cannot act as a parasite in the society that he dwells in, demonstrating only his fixed beliefs and ideas, but should be exposed and influenced as part of an interaction, the process is just as important as the resulting work.

Another artist of interesting practice is Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980), usually placed under the category of gay art. Although he studied painting, his activities overflow on performances, videos, photography, installations, curating, fashion, concert events and even publishing an art magazine, all bearing his distinct mark making him a producing studio by himself. His interest seems to be the mutation of perceptions, the coying of clichés and established ethics, creating alternative and fictional social situations. Often criticised of not being a gay-activist, not consorting to the academic notion of an artist and tending to take lightly and superficially his subject, he’s playing upon prejudices and manoeuvres through tagging himself, transfusing with his work all areas of his interest. Often making references to established notions and concepts he accomplishes to undermine and re-examine their authority. Some of his inciting works involve altering famous Polish works of art, a portrait of the Pope and a terrorist gay-gang.

What seems to be a centre point to the concept of process and the function of workshop is Grzegorz Kowalski (b. 1942) and the workshop he leads in the Sculpture department in the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Kowalnia, as this workshop is referred to, meaning the ‘blacksmith’, has greatly influenced artists of the recent years. [iii] Kowalski, a former Oskar Hansen’s student, is an artist described by an experimental and social agenda [iv] and with the aspiration to be an educator who more than teaching students, is forming artists. The concept that characterises his workshop is a method he introduced in 1981 that relates to Hansen’s theory of Open Form developed into his own theory of the ‘OWOW’ or Obszar Wspolny / Obszar Wlasny, meaning Individual Space/Common Space.

According to Kowalski an artist’s work is not about invention but about taking responsibility of one’s own reality, and Kowalnia is about the mirroring of that reality. His method is basically the process of communicating non-verbally a thought or an idea through gestures and signs with an unpredictable result, and for his classes the whole process is usually registered on video. In his workshop what he and his group of students investigate are the spatial possibilities of an action into a sequence, an interpersonal contact and a performance. The intention is to construct a space of visual communication, a common ground for discussion, conflict, confrontation, and dialogue, mutually negotiating conditions of meeting and creating a field for reaction, replication, improvisation and confession. The effect is not an artwork but the registering of a process of creation aesthetic situations. The aim of his method is the exploration of personal limits, manifesting one’s own identity, physicality and presence with the others, not at the expense of others. [v]

And on the other end is a self-taught sculptor, Michal Budny (b. 1976), an artist that is embraced by the art institutions, that started outside the academic environment of a workshop, but who seems to maintain the workshop in himself. His delicate, intangible work develops in space using common, cheap materials of a model workshop, with his subjects deriving from the mundane and the everyday, the natural phenomena of light and rain, the human condition. With a subtle way and modest materials he is investigating with his shell-like sculptures the space within, as if isolated but not indifferent to the surrounding context always commenting it. His work, appropriating a reminiscent weathered communistic aesthetic, is the work of an introvert life, like that of an artist in the dark days of socialist Poland, almost as if self-censoring his work’s hidden meanings.

It could be that the Polish visual art that has outlived the long era of Communism is not necessary spectacular, but what looks to be preserved from ‘then’ is a way of thinking on art and the preserving the notion of involvement as a stance in creative practices. And this is perhaps the language of the ‘Eastern’ artist that attempts to communicate and interact with the West in order to be more than an exotic novelty.


Tereza Papamichali is an artist who lives and works in Athens.


[i] The Introduction to a General Theory of Place, developed by the founders of Foksal Gallery, the predecessor of the foundation that operates now the Krasinski studio, is based on Tadeusz Kantor’s idea of “object’s vanishing” and was proposing a different way of exhibitions. The concept of the Theory was that ‘the exhibitions organized by the gallery […] will attempt not so much to show works as “finished” products, but to reveal certain particular conditions and circumstances surrounding their creation. […] Foksal proposes to treat these conditions and circumstances as organic elements in the display of art.’
[ii] Oskar Hansen’s theory of Open Form was to shape social space, to decenter the subjectivity of the artist and to draw other elements into the process of creation, opening the work to the intervention of the audience and of time. Open Form is in a way the shifting of the focus from the creator towards the spectator. Hansen's theory, mostly unapplied and unrealised, made a huge impact on art in Poland.
[iii] Some of his students were Katarzyna Kozyra, Artur Zmijewski, and Pawel Althammer.
[iv] ‘If we accept as fact that Art has to influence the social consciousness and that has to raise questions and introduce doubts, it is a certainty that the artist cannot comply with the current morals and ethics of the society.’ Grzegorz Kowalski, Notes for a Self-portrait, Archive of Grzegorz Kowalski’s workshop, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
[v] An interesting comment on the methods of this workshop was made by Anna Molska with her video-work OWOW11, 2007, where she edited registered sessions of the OWOW exercises and broke the prequisite rule of the non-verbal communication by having a fellow student singing out loud Kowalski’s comments on his theory and methods. By avoiding direct confrontation she is essentially distancing herself from this reputable workshop, attempting to find a place outside the conditions of its process.