22/05/2026
Cob Gallery presents British artist Cat Roissetter for Villa Róż, Warsaw offering an encounter between drawing, material archive, and architecture, using the building’s layered history as an active conceptual frame rather than a neutral backdrop. Villa Róż combines 19th-century palatial interiors with the dense, bureaucratic atmosphere of a Cold War diplomatic mission - an architecture shaped by surveillance, discretion, and control. This charged setting offers a compelling context for Roissetter’s exploration of Englishness as a cultural and psychological construct.
Art Warsaw Villa Róż
Aleja Róż 1
May 21–24, 2026
The presentation brings together a suite of new drawings with an installation of reference materials drawn from the artist’s studio: nursery rhyme books, toby jugs, and chintzy porcelain figurines. These objects are displayed independently but in close dialogue with the drawings, forming a domestic archive that mirrors the logic of Roissetter’s imagery. Together, the works stage a tension between innocence and corruption, nostalgia and repression, intimacy and observation.
Roissetter’s drawings emerge from a sustained engagement with English visual culture, particularly portraiture and moral genre painting. Her figures - bloated, tumbling, and faintly grotesque - inhabit scenes that are sexually charged without being conventionally seductive. Like the narratives of nursery rhymes or fairy tales, the imagery occupies a childlike register that barely conceals something more disturbing. Humour slips into menace; farce coexists with shame. The drawings suggest a culture in which desire is always accompanied by embarrassment or suspicion, and where propriety masks a latent excess.
Cat Roissetter
Fat Laird II, 2026
Coloured pencil, graphite, crayon on linseed, turps and cooking oil primed paper, framed in walnut
31 x 41 cm
Greed in Jade, 2026
Coloured pencil, graphite, crayon on linseed, turps and cooking oil primed paper, framed in walnut
Paper size: 31 x 41 cm
Scran, 2026
Coloured pencil, graphite, crayon on linseed, turps and cooking oil primed paper, framed in walnut
31 x 41 cm