Sarah Kravitz Gallery, 17 Soho Square, London (2026)

16/09/2026

I first had the pleasure of working with Karolina Żądło two years ago for an exhibition presented in collaboration with Olivia Stutz.

Earlier this summer, Karolina and I reunited for a studio visit in Kraków, where I was given a preview of the remarkable new body of work she has been developing.

I’m delighted to share that Karolina will be featured in an upcoming exhibition with us. More details on that soon. For now, here is a first glimpse of the new collection.

Karolina Żądło (b. 1999, Kasinka Mała, Poland) is a Polish painter who graduated with honours from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in 2024. Her work revisits traditional representations of women, exploring femininity, identity and the body. Her sensuous figurative paintings place women firmly in control of their own image.

For further information and enquiries, please contact [email protected].

15/09/2026

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending my first Polish Jazz Festival in London, with performances across Cadogan Hall and Union Chapel. Directed by Łukasz Droździel Lukasz Drozdziel

The history of Polish jazz is also a history of the Polish avant-garde. It developed in conversation with experimental composition, conceptual art, theatre, cinema and performance.

Across these disciplines, sound became more than music, something spatial, visual, physical and open to chance.

10/09/2026

Earlier this summer, I took a tour across Poland, arranging studio visits with some incredibly talented emerging artists along the way. One of these was a visit to Kacper Wiatrak’s studio in Wrocław.

Working from the contested history of Silesia, Wiatrak explores how monuments, public space and collective memory become tools for constructing national identity. His paintings reveal history not as a fixed record, but as a narrative continually rewritten through shifting borders, political ideologies and changing regimes.

Contemporary footballers appear within historical settings, drawing unexpected parallels between nationalism, public spectacle and collective belonging. Monuments remain, but their meanings shift, exposing how identities are continually redefined and the past repurposed to serve the present.

Works on show KRUPA GALLERY Wrocław, Poland.

19/07/2026

Studio visit with Jan Możdżyński

Warsaw-based painter Jan Możdżyński has long explored themes of the body, sexuality and identity. During my first visit to his studio, our conversation centred less on where the work is today than on where it has come from.

While previous works relied on symbolic, stylised figures, his latest paintings draw much more directly from his own life. They revisit childhood, relationships and the expectations we carry into adulthood, replacing broader narratives with personal ones.

That shift extends beyond the figures themselves. His sketchbooks reveal ideas that return repeatedly before finding their way onto canvas: snakes, cars, cats and domestic interiors. The snake became a recurring subject throughout our conversation. For Możdżyński, it isn’t a symbol of danger or sin, but of inherited fear and beliefs we absorb long before we have the opportunity to question them.

Możdżyński rarely discards a canvas. Instead, he paints over earlier works, leaving fragments beneath the surface so that each painting carries traces of the one before it. The paintings retain the same recurring motifs, but now begin with lived experience. Allegory has given way to autobiography.

Contact [email protected]

22/06/2026

Congratulations to Krzysztof Gil on the opening of his solo exhibition, 'Nobody Wants You Here'.

Drawing on personal memories and the histories of Romani communities across Europe, Gil’s new body of work explores questions of identity, representation and belonging through painting, sculpture and installation.

One of the works that stayed with me was Sunday Afternoon, a reinterpretation of Seurat’s iconic A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Rather than repeating a familiar image, Gil reworks it through the lens of Romani experience, removing the romanticised and exoticised ways in which Romani communities have often been depicted. The figures move through the scene as ordinary people rather than folkloric symbols, quietly challenging the assumptions that have shaped their representation throughout European art history.

📍 National Museum in Warsaw

15/06/2026

Studio visit with Agnieszka Apoznańska .

Apoznanskas’ paintings exist somewhere between apparition and memory. Encountering the works in her studio, one has the sense that the images are not entirely painted into being, but rather slowly emerging from the surface itself. Built through delicate layers of abrasion and translucent pigment, the compositions hover between figuration and disappearance, bodies dissolve into atmosphere, fruit becomes symbolic residue, and gestures remain suspended in states of becoming.

Earlier works centered around femininity, innocence, and female identity through dusty pink palettes and recurring floral motifs. Over time, this language has evolved into something more psychologically layered. In the recent paintings, fruit motifs drawn from symbolic and religious painting traditions become meditations on desire, temptation, denial, and emotional hunger.

Throughout the studio, large-scale canvases coexist with quieter portrait studies, all connected through an atmosphere of softness and restraint. Faces emerge only partially from shadow; forms seem remembered rather than observed. A recurring idea in Poznańska’s recent work is rest particularly the difficulty of accessing it within contemporary life.

What emerges most clearly from the studio visit is an artist developing an increasingly sophisticated emotional language. Poznańska’s paintings are not images to be decoded immediately; they unfold slowly, through texture, proximity, and attention. They ask the viewer not simply to observe, but to linger within uncertainty in the blurred space between longing, vulnerability, sensuality, and silence.

For all enquirers contact [email protected]

08/06/2026

I feel that the new Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN Warszawa) deserves its own moment.

More than a museum, it feels like a symbol of how far Warsaw and Poland have come. Standing in the heart of the capital opposite the Palace of Culture, the new building designed by Thomas Phifer creates a striking dialogue between the city’s past and future.

The first exhibition I encountered was Hit Where It Hurts by Przemysław Piniak, who died last year at just 39. I appreciated the fact that one of the museum’s opening exhibitions was dedicated to an artist from a younger generation rather than exclusively focusing on established international names. There is something fitting about a new institution making space for artists who were part of shaping Poland’s contemporary cultural landscape.

From there, the museum moves into Cracked Modernism, a group exhibition dedicated to Maria Jarema, one of the most important figures of the Polish avant-garde. The exhibition places her work within a broader story of artistic experimentation in twentieth century Poland and serves as a reminder that many of the cultural conversations shaping the country today have much deeper roots.

Julie Mehretu’s Kairos / Hauntological Variations provides a very different experience. Her vast, layered compositions absorb fragments of history, politics, memory and geography into works that seem almost impossible to take in all at once.

What I kept noticing throughout the museum, however, was the relationship between the exhibitions and the city outside. The enormous windows constantly pull Warsaw into view: the Palace of Culture, glass towers, construction cranes and neighbourhoods still evolving. The city becomes part of the museum experience. In a building that already feels like a statement about contemporary Poland, that connection between art, architecture and the urban landscape is particularly effective.

Taken together, the programme feels like a reflection of Warsaw itself: aware of its history, engaged with the present and confident enough to invest in what comes next.

05/06/2026

Studio visit with

Recently visited Emil Bucki in his new Warsaw studio and spent time discussing the ideas behind a practice that feels surprisingly mature for an artist only a year out of art school. I also had the opportunity to see his recent solo exhibition Klincz at Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków.

For the past 4 years, Bucki has painted almost exclusively in red. What is now the defining feature of his work wasn’t a deliberate decision at all it simply emerged through the paintings and stayed. Today, the colour feels less like a formal choice and more like an emotional temperature running through the entire practice.

What interested me most was the way he talks about relationships. Again and again, the paintings return to physical gestures: hands gripping, bodies locking together, figures reaching towards one another. Yet nothing is ever straightforward. The same gesture can read as support or restraint, intimacy or conflict.

Many of the images originate from found photographs, old textbooks, propaganda materials, films, and things encountered online. But Bucki transforms them into something more human. Even his references to post-Soviet culture feel less concerned with politics itself and more with the ways people are shaped by fear, loyalty, memory, and belonging.

Standing in front of the work, what stays with you is not the symbolism or the references. It’s the feeling that every figure is caught somewhere between connection and confrontation and that neither state can exist without the other.

For a catalogue of available works, please contact:
[email protected]

03/06/2026

London > Warsaw 💥

27/05/2026

I recently visited the Borowik Foundation in Saska Kępa and spent time with Michał Borowik while viewing the final day of 'The Shape of Life'.

The exhibition brought together works by Edward Dwurnik, Katarzyna Kozyra, Hans Bellmer, Kateryna Lysovenko, Agata Słowak, Jakub Julian Ziółkowski and others, moving through questions of memory, identity, violence, imagination, and collective experience. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, the exhibition allowed different histories and psychological states to sit beside one another in tension.

Speaking with Michał Borowik also prompted a broader reflection on the position of Polish contemporary art internationally. My own engagement with the Polish art scene began in 2015 through researching and representing Polish artists from London. Being born in the UK while also being Polish has allowed me to navigate both Western and Central and Eastern European cultural contexts simultaneously, giving me a dual understanding of both regions. This has enabled me to act not only as a representative of artists and practices from the region, but also as a kind of messenger between different cultural and institutional landscapes.

Over the past decade it has been striking to witness how much institutional support and international visibility has developed around a scene that has, in reality, existed for far longer.

Poland has produced decades of important artistic movements across theatre, graphic design, conceptual art, performance, and painting, often shaped in direct response to political rupture and social transformation, yet much of this history still remains insufficiently represented outside of Poland.

What the Borowik Foundation appears to understand clearly is that supporting contemporary artists also means protecting cultural continuity, creating conditions where younger generations of artists can develop within an awareness of the histories that precede them, rather than outside of them.

Sarah Kravitz

Sarah Kravitz Gallery

16/09/2026

15/09/2026

10/09/2026

19/07/2026

22/06/2026

15/06/2026

08/06/2026

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03/06/2026

27/05/2026

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